Crowd-based Company Research vendor Owler added contacts to its Owler Max Sales Intelligence service. Owler was launched in 2011 by Jim Fowler after he sold contacts database Jigsaw (renamed Data.com but now decommissioned) to Salesforce. Both databases employed a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to collecting data, but Owler offered only the CEO name and executive change news alerts. Broader contact details for its 15 million company profiles were not available until now.
Owler grew into a respected database for competitive tracking, funding data, and news alerts but avoided contact data. As it increasingly positioned itself as a sales tool, it needed to address its lack of contacts.
Contact Data, which is only being added to its top-end Max edition, includes direct phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles for 150 million North American professionals. Along with firmographics, users can filter contacts by Job Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Location.
Contact data is available via Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chrome.
‘We are very excited to introduce Contact Data into our Owler Max tool. This is a powerful way to get in touch with potential customers and partners,” stated CEO Tim Harsch. “Our goal has always been to make it easier for companies to grow and succeed, and this new addition to our platform will help our users do just that.”
Contacts may be filtered by Name, Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Current Location.
TruVoice can also be used for customer experience, competitive analysis, and churn analysis.
Primary Intelligence has collected win/loss intelligence through manual post-mortem deal interviews for twenty years. Automating the process both lowers the cost of intelligence collection and widens the scope of intelligence collected. Survey response rates are between 25% and 35% due to the request coming from the sales rep. Online surveys run ten to fifteen minutes and are dynamically adjusted based on the responses. TruVoice collects both qualitative and quantitative responses.
Primary Intelligence Buyer Insights provide a roll-up of win/loss insights at an account. Users can drill down to “direct evidence” from the interviews.
“We’ve taken the live interview model that we have honed over our entire existence and turned it into an online experience, where we call it an online interview. But it really is something that a respondent can do in ten minutes on a mobile device. There are some quantitative questions for them to record voice responses, which we then transcribe and…publish that data. And then we still do the live interview.”
“The value of win-loss-no decision analysis at scale is that you have continuous, near real-time feedback on a higher percentage of accounts for improved insights and confident strategy adjustments across all of your revenue teams,” said Primary Intelligence CEO Ken Allred. “But the biggest breakthrough is having the ongoing rep-by-rep, deal-by-deal intelligence to drive situational training and enablement. This eliminates the bias of reps providing their own feedback or requiring managers to review hundreds of hours of call recordings.”
Gong and Crayon Partnerships
Primary Intelligence recently partnered with conversational sales platform Gong to integrate in-cycle deal intelligence. Primary Intelligence delivers a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard links and links to call transcripts that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements. The Gong integration ensures that conversational intelligence from deals is available alongside post-deal analysis, providing a clearer view of why deals are won or lost, comparative strengths and weaknesses versus competitors, and improved messaging.
“Our approach in the last five years or so has been [asking] ‘How can we take the operational lift and automate as much as possible?” explained Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway to GZ Consulting. “Now it’s a process that begins in Salesforce or whatever CRM you’re using.”
The Performance Gaps view displays competitive strengths and weaknesses as seen by buyers and displayed by priority.
Primary Intelligence also recently partnered with Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon, marrying competitive and win/loss intelligence in a common platform. The joint solution “helps teams better understand their competitors.”
“In today’s competitive climate, competitive intelligence and win-loss analysis are essential for B2B companies looking to increase win rates,” stated the firms. “While win-loss interviews and surveys with buyers are filled with critical competitive insights, getting these insights updated into competitive intelligence deliverables, such as battlecards, has traditionally been a slow, manual process — until now.”
Crayon and Primary Intelligence highlight competitor offerings’ relative strengths and weaknesses, providing improved positioning for sales and marketing teams. A separate pricing module helps debunk sales rep claims that deals are regularly lost on price, providing a more accurate view of deal loss. By helping differentiate offerings and identify why deals are won or lost, vendor offerings become less price sensitive.
Primary Intelligence also provides views at the rep level, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of reps and where they would benefit from coaching.
“The future of sales enablement is providing custom, rep-specific coaching in the flow of work. Ideally, those recommendations are based on actual performance feedback from real customers,” said Erik Peterson, Chief Executive Officer of Corporate Visions. “The acquisition of Primary Intelligence will enable us to make invisible problems visible and then provide personalized coaching to individual reps and revenue teams based on how buyers and customers respond.”
“What better evidence that your strategies and spend are actually working as intended than actual customer feedback connected to wins, losses, and no decisions, as well as renewals and expansion cycles?” Peterson added.
B2B DecisionLabs
The acquisition provides Corporate Visions with 100,000 buying decisions spanning twenty years, which will be incorporated into its B2B DecisionLabsresearch and advisory business. Corporate Visions, which positions itself as a Decision Science company, calls Primary Intelligence its “fourth lab.” B2B DecisionLabs incorporates behavioral research, brain studies, and field trials, alongside customer feedback.
TruVoice customer feedback is Corporate Vision’s latest B2B DecisionLabs laboratory.
“We will engage our B2B DecisionLabs research director, Dr. Leff Bonney, co-founder of the Florida State University Sales Institute, to effectively leverage the incoming data points into insights using all applicable and appropriate academic research-based approaches, tools, and techniques,” explained Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer at Corporate Visions and Chief Visionary at B2B DecisionLabs, to GZ Consulting.
“Our expectation is that this steady flow of buyer-driven deal insights will completely distinguish B2B DecisionLabs among other research and advisory firms who rely on their subscriber clients to provide data snapshots and self-reported survey responses to formulate their industry insights,” continued Riesterer. “This will be in addition to our completely unique brain study lab and ongoing field trials with actual clients.”
The Primary Intelligence dataset provides a deep set of historical and cross-industry data that captures deals both in progress and after closing. This research complements its other three research laboratories.
“This will give our advisory clients even more confidence in the B2B DecisionLabs recommendations compared to opinion surveys and moment-in-time snapshots of data,” said Riesterer. “It will also mean we can provide more reliable tools than you otherwise get from peer communities that only curate unexamined personal experiences and unsubstantiated claims of expertise.”
“This ongoing flow of customer-sourced data will also be used to continually expand and enhance our revenue growth services to ensure Corporate Visions’ clients always have access to the industry’s best and most updated intellectual property,” Riesterer added.
Corporate Visions offers science-backed revenue growth services for sales, marketing, and customer success. Along with hosting conferences and training, Corporate Visions helps firms “articulate value and promote growth” in three ways:
Make Value Situational by distinguishing your commercial programs between customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Make Value Specific by creating and delivering customer conversations that communicate concrete value, change behavior, and motivate buying decisions.
Make Value Systematic by equipping your commercial engine to deliver consistent and persistent touches across the entire Customer Deciding Journey.
By April, Corporate Visions plans to combine automated win-loss-no decision customer feedback with automated skills coaching and customer messaging content from Corporate Visions. Riesterer intends to launch the “first fully automated, situational enablement solution that identifies rep-by-rep weaknesses based on actual customer feedback, to direct specific, custom coaching videos to help address these challenges – in the rep’s flow of work.”
This vision shifts sales rep training from “just-in-case” event-based generic classroom training to “just-in-time” situational coaching and enablement that is customized to each rep and deal. This training will be “always on, deficit-based situational coaching and enablement” that does not require managers to “listen to a bunch of calls or read a lot of feedback and then formulate a custom coaching plan.”
Data Anonymization
Corporate Visions has already considered which data can be employed for aggregate analytics. Research protocols are subject to Institutional Review Board (IRB) review and approval. Data will only be available for aggregate analysis with the consent of customers. Unique identifiers are stripped from the data and replaced with arbitrary data identifiers, and no individual customer’s data will be published.
B2B DecisionLabs has “partnered with Florida State University as the primary means of data analysis and have taken the steps as outlined in GDPR protocols regarding ‘Information Processors’ to ensure that data is passed to FSU without any unique respondent identifiers,” explained Bonney. “To decrease any risk of inadvertent identification of a customer in the data, Primary Intelligence will assign the ‘ID number’ to customer data and then pass [it] to the B2B DecisionLabs and FSU research team, who will have no input or insight into how data ID numbers are assigned. Additionally, Primary Intelligence will remove any data fields that may be used to ascertain the identity of any one customer.”
The FSU IRB will review Primary Intelligence’s anonymization protocols.
Real-time Coaching
Managerial deal coaching “just doesn’t happen and won’t happen at scale,” remarked Riesterer. Furthermore, “because the system continues to run and generate customer deal feedback, you will be able to monitor, measure, and modify enablement interventions on the fly to see the impact and make continuous appropriate adjustments.”
Thus, the merged company will combine neural research concerning purchasing behavior and buyer studies, with in-the-moment situational coaching tailored to each rep and deal.
Primary Intelligence Buyer Insights provides a rollup of win/loss insights at an account. Users can drill down to “direct evidence” from the interviews.
Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon announced an integration with win/loss insights platform Primary Intelligence, marrying competitive and win/loss intelligence in a common platform. The joint solution “helps teams better understand their competitors.”
“In today’s competitive climate, competitive intelligence and win-loss analysis are essential for B2B companies looking to increase win rates,” stated the firms. “While win-loss interviews and surveys with buyers are filled with critical competitive insights, getting these insights updated into competitive intelligence deliverables, such as battlecards, has traditionally been a slow, manual process — until now.”
Win/loss analysis is conducted after deals close. Primary Intelligence acts as a third-party collecting data concerning why they selected the vendor, who else was considered, their selection criteria, and how the vendor stacked up against other vendors across the selection criteria. Historically, this was a human-driven service, making integrating the intelligence into the CRM challenging and restricting availability to the top B2B firms.
“Our approach in the last five years or so has been [asking] ‘How can we take the operational lift and automate as much as possible?” explained Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway to GZ Consulting. “Now it’s a process that begins in Salesforce or whatever CRM you’re using.”
Primary Intelligence reaches out to decision-makers associated with an opportunity as soon as the deal closes. Primary Intelligence sends an email from the sales rep requesting an online interview. Automated surveys increase the number of buying committee members that can be interviewed before hitting budgetary caps and make the service available to a broader set of clients.
Survey response rates are between 25% and 35% due to the request coming from the sales rep. Online surveys run ten to fifteen minutes and are dynamically adjusted based on the responses.
“We’ve taken the live interview model that we have honed over our entire existence and turned it into an online experience, where we call it an online interview. But it really is something that a respondent can do in ten minutes on a mobile device. There are some quantitative questions for them to record voice responses, which we then transcribe and…publish that data. And then we still do the live interview.”
Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway
Furthermore, the firm has “democratized” win/loss research for “smaller organizations that can’t budget $1,000 an interview,” said Siddoway.
Primary Intelligence also analyzes Gong recordings during the sales window, providing both in-flight and post-mortem deal analysis.
Primary Intelligence’s TruVoice platform conducts surveys, online interviews, and live phone interviews. In addition, buyer feedback is displayed in Crayon and available in battlecards, newsletters, and dashboards, providing “more depth, context, and insight from the buyer’s perspective.”
TruVoice can also be used for customer experience, competitive analysis, and churn analysis. It also offers an aggregated Performance Gaps view that displays strengths and weaknesses according to buyer prioritization.
The Performance Gaps view displays competitive strengths and weaknesses as seen by buyers and displayed by priority.
Primary Intelligence battle cards, available with Crayon, rollup feedback on competitive deals. Reps can see all related deals, outcomes, and competitive insights with quotes. Siddoway described the battlecards as a frequently used feature by sales reps as they can find direct competitor-related quotes from previous deals and forward them to current prospects.
“Today, every deal is a competitive deal,” argued Siddoway. “Through our 20+ years of win-loss analysis, we’ve seen the impact competitive intelligence has on win rate. If you can provide your reps with that insight and help them have confidence when selling against competitors, it makes all the difference. This integration is going to be game-changing for our mutual customers.”
“Competitive intelligence professionals and product marketers have historically struggled to include critical win-loss insights within the competitive assets their revenue teams use every day to win more business,” stated Crayon VP of Strategy Chris Pope. “Due to this unique integration, our mutual customers will now be able to solve this problem in an automated way for the very first time.”
Siddoway noted that sales reps are often in the dark about why they lost a deal. “They’re wrong more than half the time about why they really lost an opportunity. So, we just stopped asking [them].”
Primary Intelligence offers a separate module for price. Back when I did competitive intelligence, deal price was the reps’ favorite explanation for lost opportunities, so having third-party win/loss data with comparative prices and decision criteria helps with pricing analysis.
“Here’s your wins and losses, and here’s the percentage of time you are higher, lower, or similarly priced. Every sales rep’s favorite reason for losing is price. I love coming in with their data and saying, ‘Yeah, but you actually win half the time as the higher price option,’” said Siddoway.
Furthermore, by helping differentiate offerings, vendor offerings become less price sensitive. Crayon and Primary Intelligence highlight competitor offerings’ relative strengths and weaknesses, providing improved positioning for sales and marketing teams.
Primary Intelligence also provides views at the rep level, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of reps and where they would benefit from coaching.
Last June, Crayon announced a partnership with Gong to deliver a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard and call transcript links that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements. “Product marketers and competitive intelligence professionals dedicate a tremendous amount of time ensuring sales reps are equipped with the most up-to-date competitive and market intelligence,” stated Crayon CPO Erica Jenkins. “However, despite these efforts, there’s still friction around the adoption and use of these enablement materials. The integration between Crayon and Gong gets competitive intel into an account executive’s hands quickly and easily, drastically improving competitive positioning for reps to level up their game.”
Owler maintains lists of companies that have been synced with HubSpot.
Company Intelligence vendor Owler unveiled a pair of integrations with HubSpot and Microsoft Teams. Both offerings are available through its Owler Max subscription product for sales reps.
Owler supports competitive and sales intelligence, with data gathered from web mining and crowdsourcing. Along with standard firmographics, it offers M&A intelligence, funding profiles, company news alerts, and twenty-three sales triggers.
Owler Max is their sales intelligence edition with CRM syncing, email alerts, and prospecting. Reps control which of the twenty-three alert categories are relevant, including new triggers based on revenue and employee count changes.
Company prospecting selects include industry, location, company status, revenue, employee counts, funding history, and competitors. Owler profiles 15 million global companies, with the option to push companies and lists to the CRM. Company data is passed bi-directionally, while news can be used to create HubSpot Tasks or display alerts via email, HubSpot, or Slack.
News and company profile links are embedded within HubSpot Tasks.
“Owler Max provides sales teams with resources they need to do their jobs the best they possibly can,” said Owler CEO Tim Harsch. “Our new integrations and data insights offer sales teams key improvements to organization, workflow, and research efficiency. Sales professionals can leverage data better, drive desired results quicker, and grow the capacity of collaboration in the remote work era.”
Owler syncs data every six hours and can match and upload 1,000 records per minute.
The Teams integration was launched back in August. Owler Max users will see their MS Teams instance in the Owler Max dashboard. They then click connect, name the connection, and syncing commences for all followed companies. Team members can then read, collaborate, or share company intelligence via Teams or email, with alerts automatically posted to Teams channels. Alerts may be aggregated from all lists or customized. Users can also control which of its nearly two dozen event categories should be shared so that only relevant topics are posted.
“Owler Max’s new offerings put sales teams on a straight path to winning. To unlock their full potential, sales teams need efficient access to personalized data and tools for seamless workflow. By providing this scaffolding, Owler Max gives sales professionals an immediate competitive edge.”
Owler CEO Tim Harsch
Owler Max is priced at $600 per annum with a minimum of five seats. Owler Max also supports a Salesforce connector.
One of the unsung benefits of conversational intelligence is market and competitive monitoring for product and strategy teams. Vendors such as Gong and Chorus can tag competitors and product requests. Still, this intelligence needs to be regularly and directly reviewed, making it more of a hit-or-miss proposition. Furthermore, this intelligence is rarely tied to competitive battlecards for sales reps.
Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon is looking to address these issues. It now delivers a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard links and links to call transcripts that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements. The mentions are collected from Gong.
“Product marketers and competitive intelligence professionals dedicate a tremendous amount of time ensuring sales reps are equipped with the most up-to-date competitive and market intelligence,” stated Crayon CPO Erica Jenkins. “However, despite these efforts, there’s still friction around the adoption and use of these enablement materials. The integration between Crayon and Gong gets competitive intel into an account executive’s hands quickly and easily, drastically improving competitive positioning for reps to level up their game.”
Crayon listed two other Gong-related initiatives on its roadmap to assist CI and strategy professionals:
Field intelligence: Your prospects and customers are sharing intel with your colleagues every single day. Remove the middleman by automatically pulling these insights out of Gong transcripts and pushing them into your Crayon portal.
Win-loss analysis: When an account is won or lost, the notes you find in your CRM will only tell one side of the story. Find out what really happened by pulling Gong snippets into Crayon, where they’ll be matched with the notes that our system pulls in from Salesforce.
These future releases will benefit competitive intelligence and strategy professionals who struggle to gather real-time market intelligence, particularly from remote individuals. For example, while sales reps are often happy to discuss competitive scenarios, they rarely take the time to record competitive details in the CRM. Conversational intelligence platforms are an excellent source of this intelligence, which can be automatically fed into competitive platforms such as Crayon, helping to close the loop.
When I was a CI professional at a SalesTech company, gathering competitive intelligence generally involved interviewing customers, prospects, and inside sales reps and collecting and synthesizing this information. This approach was haphazard and often anecdotal. Although Competitor fields were added to the CRM, they were rarely populated, and virtually all losses were attributed to pricing.
A structured set of competitive signals gathered from customer conversations would have been significantly more accurate, complete, and timely. Furthermore, these signals and comments would have omitted sales rep biases concerning lost deals and enabled competitive coaching on high-value deals.
Crayon supports a broad set of Sales Enablement Platforms, including Seismic, Highspot, and Showpad. The Gong-Crayon integration is immediately available to joint customers.
As a member of SCIP (Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals) and a former CI practitioner (I am more of an industry analyst and market researcher these days, but the skills and tools often overlap), I pay attention to research on the efficacy and ROI of CI. Unfortunately, CI’s role is often diffuse across the organization, providing both strategic and tactical assistance across a broad set of functions. Thus, the impact is often difficult to properly attribute.
Thus, I wasn’t surprised when a Crayon survey on the State of Competitive Intelligence found that only 61% of CI Professionals and Stakeholders believed that CI boosts revenue (26% felt that it did not). And it may be that some of those professionals that hold a dim view of CI worked at companies that lacked somebody in that role or simply assigned a product marketing manager to perform CI along with several other duties.
But the confidence level should be higher. After all, a good CI person or team:
Monitors the market for general trends, new product launches, product enhancements, emerging technologies, key events (partnerships, funding, acquisitions, executive changes, filings), and competitors.
Briefs senior level management on the market, highlighting opportunities and threats.
Briefs product management on product gaps and weaknesses that place the company at a market disadvantage.
Performs competitive benchmarking, collects pricing data and market collateral, and monitors competitive positioning.
Assesses competitor’s product launches and major upgrades and briefs internal stakeholders.
Assists with product launches by briefing marketing and sales on competitive positioning, addressing the question of how new products and features stack up in the marketplace.
Supports new hire onboarding, particularly for product management, product marketing, executives, and sales professionals.
Trains sales reps in how to position vs. competitors, lay landmines for competitors, parry competitive charges, and stay above the fray (i.e. remain professional and avoid slinging mud).
Joins sales calls (usually virtually) when the client wishes to discuss the competitive landscape.
Provide on-demand support to sales reps.
Review RFPs and RFIs to determine whether they are neutral or one of the competitors has influenced the process.
Collects internal competitive data from CRMs and competitive mentions during sales calls. Conversational Intelligence from vendors such as Chorus and Gong is an emerging data collection opportunity and is integrated into Crayon’s and Primary Intelligence’s platforms.
If a CI team is performing these duties in a timely and accurate manner, then there is no doubt that they influence revenue generation both in the short and long term.
Source: Crayon, “NEW DATA: 61% of Businesses Say Competitive Intelligence Directly Impacts Revenue,” March 2021
Crayon also found that the impact to CI was strongly related to the creation of KPIs for the program. Without KPIs, 57% of professionals were unsure about the impact of CI on revenue. When KPIs were in place, 78% of survey respondents were confident that CI helped drive revenue.
The frequency of CI distribution is also strongly related to its impact. 70% of respondents with daily or weekly intelligence distribution said that CI helped increase revenue, falling to 55% monthly and 46% quarterly. The frequency of messaging probably has several effects: it reinforces the role of CI in the organization, it delivers a timelier and more comprehensive work product, and it embeds CI into the knowledge flow and company discussions.
Competitive Intelligence professionals help drive revenue growth through their interactions with sales, marketing, product management, and c-level executives, fostering better planning, messaging, and product development.
Last month, HG Insights launched its Market Intelligence service that supports technographic market research. The analytics service supports sales, marketing, and strategy teams at B2B vendors, letting them develop account plans, segment markets, evaluate market entry, and size opportunities.
Product and strategy teams can analyze market trends, size market opportunities, and assess competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They can also use it to identify the Service Obtainable Market (SOM), which is the market segment size a firm can capture with its solution. As HG Insights notes in the following graphic, the SOM is a narrower definition of market potential than TAM (Total Addressable Market) and SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market).
For example, many entrenched vendors in the North American Sales Intelligence space have robust solutions and established market share. Looking to displace LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoominfo, D&B Hoovers, and InsideView in the most mature Sales Intelligence segment would be difficult. However, a SOM analysis would indicate that the UK is the second most mature market and that continental Europe is beginning to take off. Thus, a product manager might focus on European content and multi-lingual capabilities (e.g., UX, event tagging, free form text translation). Likewise, they might select niche markets such as financial services with strong compliance requirements or choose to develop functionally differentiated services (e.g., GrowFlare focused on psychographics and ICPs before being acquired by Terminus late last year).
“Without a SOM containing detailed information about competitor product installations, you’d have no way of knowing this and might decide to go to market in a region saturated by competition you have very little likelihood of displacing. Alternatively, what if you were looking at different regions or countries and wanted to identify which situations represented the best growth opportunities for your business. Again, knowing the estimated market size in revenue isn’t going to help you much. But what if you knew what companies had budgeted to spend on your category of product by region, entity, or industry?”
HG Insights VP of Global Sales Scott Smyth
“Business leaders need more than high-level market reports to make successful go-to-market decisions,” said HG Insights EVP of Product Rana Kanaan. “With our actionable market intelligence offering, we are giving our customers the ability to customize their market views by the attributes they care about most and operationalize intelligence for their revenue teams. This allows them to allocate resources more effectively, prioritize the right product initiatives, and give their sales and marketing teams the account details they need to pursue the best opportunities.”
Scott Smyth is offering a master class on TAM/SAM/SOM on February 24th. Here is the information:
The Competition tab compares a company against three local peers, allowing reps to take a value-added discussion approach to customer and prospect meetings. This benchmarking can be performed as early as the first call, helping to differentiate the sales rep. Should the prospect wish to see other competitors, the representative can quickly remove one of the competitors and add a requested company to the analysis. The competitive benchmark supports three tabs: Digital Marketing, HR & Organization, and Communications.
BuzzBoard recommends that reps not go through the competitive report line-by-line, but focus on two or three categories where the vendor “has solutions.” Going line-by-line is “the digital equivalent to the PowerPoint presentation,” warns BuzzBoard Director of Community & Training Phillip Cortez.
Category Insights include local advertising intelligence from Borrell Associates. Borrell data includes industry-specific ad budgets for local markets. Local data is available for both digital advertising, non-digital advertising, and their sub-categories (e.g. General Paid Search, Targeted Display, Listings Paid Search, Newspapers, Local Broadcast TV, Radio). There is also a section on Audience Targeting Opportunities for the industry, providing fodder for sales conversations. This intelligence would also be valuable for the marketing communications team in developing blog and social content that targets top segments. Other sections include technology trends, threats and opportunities, top products and services, and “know their customers.”
The Recommendations tab provides a set of recommendations and talking points based on gaps in a firm’s digital marketing presence.
BuzzBoard is well-positioned for firms that target SMBs, particularly if they provide digital services of some form. This focus, however, makes them ill-suited for enterprise sales. The database does not offer company linkages, long business descriptions, tickers (for quickly looking up the HQ of a firm), filings, financials, etc. However, they are clear in their positioning as a B2SMB database.
BuzzBoard is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Lyndhurst, New Jersey and Hyderabad (engineering). The firm has 85 employees with open positions in sales, customer success, engineering, and product management.
COVID-19 has “not really impacted us substantially,” said CEO Umesh Tibrewal.
If a US public company, look at its 10-K (annual report). Firms generally discuss their competitors. You can locate the 10-K on a company’s investor site, through sales intelligence vendors, or free Edgar sites.
If a private company, look at Owler, a free site (See below). This is crowdsourced so may include firms that aren’t true competitors.
Owler competitor lists are gathered through social voting.
Look at sales intelligence services such as D&B Hoovers or InsideView. Hoover’s competitors are editorially generated and include top three flags (see below)
D&B Hoover’s competitor lists are gathered by a team of researchers.
Within IT, look at Forrester Wave reports. Another option is technology category searches in PE/VC databases such as DataFox, Crunchbase, Pitchbook, or CB Insights. Keep in mind that companies within the same segment may not be competitors, but partners, customers, etc.
Many industries have industry specific market research that includes competitors. A few general market research firms also provide competitors (e.g. MarketLine, Euromonitor, Global Data, and Freedonia). Top Competitors are also available in IBISWorld, Vertical IQ, and First Research.
Zoominfo and a few other vendors identify similar companies based upon proximity in articles. This finds competitors, but also customers and partners so should be carefully reviewed.
For new technologies or industries, D&B Hoovers offers Conceptual Search which identify companies associated with key phrases (e.g. Marcellus Shale, Obamacare). This is more of an associated companies list and will identify firms in a topical ecosystem. For example, “Harry Potter” identifies studios, publishers, toy makers, theme parks, and thematic tours. (See example below of conceptual search on Marcellus Shale). Conceptual Search lists may be refined by standard prospecting filters such as industry, geography, and size.
D&B Hoover’s Conceptual Search looks for companies associated with specific phrases.
If none of these work, use peer list searches (industry code lists) or keyword searches in sales intelligence vendors. If cost is a concern, go to your public library and see if they have ReferenceUSA, AtoZDatabases, or Mergent Online. Each of these allows you to build peer lists based on industry codes, company size, and geography. If you need help, ask for the business or reference librarian to assist.
I much prefer looking at competition as a set of parries and thrusts. Competitors are to be respected. Disparaging competitors only serves to undermine your case and is indicative of fear.
I wanted to call attention to an excellent article written by Dave Kahle in Industrial Supply which aligns fully with my philosophy on B2B competitive strategy and sales training. For nearly two decades I have emphasized the value of staying above the fray with a focus on a company’s unique value proposition and strengths. While the easiest route is to disparage a competitor, it generally conveys fear and a lack of confidence in your own offering. This tends to undermine trust in your company and its people.
“Disparaging the competition – speaking badly about the company or the individual salespeople, using little innuendos and side comments – all of this says more about us to our customers than it does about the competitors to whom we are referring. It reveals us as small-minded, petty, smug and far more interested in ourselves than we are in our customers.”
Dave Kahle, Author and Sales Trainer
Instead I have advocated only discussing competitors when directly questioned about them. In that case, I have recommended a fast pivot where the rep recognizes a strength and then quickly segues back to their offering. The strength should be real and non-trivial, but not applicable to your customer. For example, if selling to an SMB, saying that the competitor offers highly customizable solutions for enterprises, but your offering is designed for small businesses with a straightforward user experience. Such an approach is honest, differentiates yourself from the competitor, and avoids mudslinging.
Kahle offers several alternative, but equally valuable strategies for staying above the fray. Instead of speaking directly about a specific company, generalize the competition. Generalization “provides you a means of pointing out your distinctiveness without being negative about your specific competitors.”
Kahle also suggests posing statements in question form to help frame the prospect’s thinking;
Don’t say, “Y Company is a small local company that doesn’t have the systems or technology to support you in the long run.” Instead, say, “One of the questions you should ask of every vendor is this, ‘What technology and systems do you have in place to assure that you will be able to support us for the long run?’”
Another strategy is a feature list between companies, but I am not particularly fond of this approach for tech firms as the table needs to be assiduously maintained and it shifts the focus from value to features. Furthermore, such lists aren’t tailored to the needs of individual prospects and prospects are likely to view such collateral as biased. When I used to put together such tools, I avoided simple checklists and instead focused on workflow stages and framed the discussion as features and benefits in the context of each stage. Each comparison was dated and I told sales reps that I would perform a just-in-time review of the tool if it was more than several months old.
“While we can’t change the competition, we certainly are responsible for our attitudes and behaviors toward the competition,” wrote Kahle. “What we say and how we act about the competition can have a daily bearing on our bottom lines. An appropriate attitude and set of practices for dealing with the competition should be an essential part of every salesperson’s repertoire.”
It is easy to disdain the competition and crow about your product or service, but competitors should be respected. They also have well qualified sales reps and some feature advantages. “From the 10,000-foot-high perspective, if your competitors were as flawed as you think they are, they wouldn’t be in business, and your customers wouldn’t be buying from them,” said Kahle. “So, bury those attitudes of superiority, and cast off that disdain for the competition. If your customers didn’t think they presented a viable option, they wouldn’t be buying from them.”
Kahle suggests that if a company is truly focused on its customers’ needs, then competitive offers are irrelevant. “Your mindset, from the beginning, is not a bit focused on the competition, but rather is 100 percent targeted to completely understanding the customer’s requirements. The conversation is not about how you compare to the competition, but rather how you meet the customer’s needs.”
DoD photo by Master Sgt. Lono Kollars, U.S. Air Force. Public Domain.
