ABX Platform Demandbase released one of its “largest product launches of the year”: Audience Management Destinations. While the firm has long supported B2B Campaigns via display advertising and LinkedIn channels, Audience Management Destinations extends its reach into consumer platforms and social advertising.
“B2B buyers are people, too, and B2B marketers can and should be advertising on those channels,” said Demandbase CMO Jon Miller.
New advertising channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Bing, and Adobe Audience Manager. Additional services will be rolled out next year.
Demandbase does not store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so its social outreach is GDPR and CCPA compliant. Instead, Demandbase leverages LiveRamp’s identity resolution, an opted-in identifier system that matches individual identifiers across platforms.
Demandbase also expanded its integration with LinkedIn. Previously, it only supported account-level targeting on LinkedIn, but now marketers can target at either the account or person level.
Demandbase Targeting
Marketers will build audiences using a set of selectors that include first-party data, third-party data, intent, technographics, and activities. (See the image on the right). They can then activate campaigns to their targeted buyers across the business and social web.
“This will allow a highly consistent customer experience across social networks and other platforms,” explained Miller on LinkedIn. In addition, the new release expands marketing’s outreach and orchestration across a broader set of channels “using the account intelligence and the Demandbase One platform.”
“We’re constantly learning about how the B2B buyer thinks and acts, and this new account-based social targeting functionality plays a role in reaching buyers more holistically,” said Miller. “By viewing the buyer not just as someone within a target account or in a buying committee, we recognize that buyers are individuals, too. This mindset shift — and the corresponding ability to engage with them as such across business and social platforms — gives our customers yet another advantage in today’s B2B go-to-market landscape.”
Demandbase claims that it is the only system that runs both “people and account-based plays from one system.” Marketers can target specific audiences and “then automatically apply the most effective sales and marketing tactics to advance the account in its journey, across every touchpoint, and with the most relevant messages.”
Demandbase supports its own intent data along with partner datasets from Bombora and G2. TrustRadius is coming soon.
“Demandbase’s solutions are stronger in certain areas and helps drive top of the funnel engagement or audience targeting, while InsideView has been more focused on bottom of the funnel data. We realized the two companies are quite complimentary and we could combine our customers to offer a much more complete solution to all of them. Today we have an integrated top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel marketing and sales data provision to allow customers to look at the full funnel and identify a more appropriate addressable market, including what kind of technologies those companies use.”
InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti to MarTech Series this week
The three companies combined to create a four-cloud solution that supports Advertising, ABX Marketing, Sales Intelligence, and Data.
“What’s exciting about this is the ability to provide all of this to customers as one solution,” continued Milletti. “We have done a lot of work since the merger was completed to combine all of our technologies and go to our customers with information on how much more we can do for them.”
Demandbase combined its Demandbase One platform with InsideView and DemandMatrix to support four clouds.
“It’s a feeling of expansion, born of learning so much from our customers, and born of the digital transformation that has happened in the last year,” said Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol. “This is an intentional step for us beyond being solely an ABM leader and into broader B2B go-to-market. That’s important because ABM is just a part of the go-to-market challenges that B2B companies face.”
The new services are packaged as an ABM Suite consisting of four clouds: ABX, Advertising, Sales Intelligence, and Data. Customers will have the flexibility to order various elements of the suite, selecting the clouds and services that fit their needs.
“Our focus has been on building the most complete ABM solution (we call it ABX, because it’s not just marketing),” said Rogol, “and that was the impetus behind acquiring Engagio, putting a lot of the top of funnel and lower funnel stuff together. That will still be important.”
While some may view this as Demandbase growing beyond ABX, it is an opportunity for them to complete the ABX vision. I have long been critical of Demandbase’s limited framing of ABM within the marketing department. While they acquired Spiderbook, a small sales intelligence vendor, a few years ago, it withered on the vine and is no longer mentioned by the firm. InsideView provides them with an opportunity to realize ABX as a complete customer lifecycle solution. There are still missing elements such as sales engagement tools and chatbots, but they are now working on a much wider canvas.
Demandbase is in a sprint to establish the ABX platform space against vendors such as Terminus, 6Sense, and Dun & Bradstreet. It has been using the ABM three-letter acronym for a dozen years and was a lonely voice extolling ABM for half of that time, arguing for a shift from demand generation marketing to account-based strategies. Earlier this year, it shifted from ABM to ABX (Account Based Experience), which places a greater emphasis on long-term relationships with customers and the broader revenue team (sales, marketing, customer success).
“We’re proud to join forces with these two great companies. Our vision is bold. We are transforming how B2B companies go to market, helping them deliver great experiences at every stage of the account journey. This requires great data — and we now have the premium B2B data and intelligence solutions to help companies identify, understand, and engage their customers and prospects. With this move, Demandbase moves from being ‘just’ a leader in account-based programs to being the definitive leader in B2B go-to-market…
These new offerings let us work even more flexibly with our customers. Customers can mix and match to focus on the areas most important for them, whether that’s data embedded to their existing systems, or advertising, or sales intelligence, or a full account-based transformation. We are moving aggressively to deliver on this mission, and no company will move faster than us to achieve it.”
Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol
Acquiring InsideView and DemandMatrix strengthens its position in both marketing and sales. Furthermore, InsideView’s sales triggers provide Demandbase customers with a rich set of talking points for account managers and customer success teams, letting them know if there are executive changes, M&A events, new partnerships, etc.
Demandbase One added the Sales Intelligence and Data Clouds with this week’s acquisitions.
Demandbase, which offers an ABX Cloud and an Advertising Cloud, now supports a Data Cloud and Sales Intelligence Cloud. The Sales Intelligence Cloud is based upon InsideView and supports:
Prospect Finder – A traditional list-building feature for company and contact data. Along with firmographic and biographic data, the InsideView prospect finder includes connection variables (Who Know Who “six degrees”), sales triggers (17 + custom variables), data availability (e.g., LinkedIn Connections, Email), and suppression lists.
Browser Extension – A Chrome extension for quick lookup and prospecting. The extension displays InsideView company and contact profiles from LinkedIn, company websites, and CRMs. Records may be sent to the CRM or Sales Engagement Platforms.
News and Social Insights – InsideView publishes daily email alerts based upon their sales triggers. As these are event-based, most company noise (e.g., stock price fluctuations, scores for teams playing at branded stadia) is removed and duplicates suppressed. They also support inline social media viewing for Facebook, Twitter, and Company Blogs. Inline viewing helps account managers and customer success teams stay abreast of key accounts. It also assists marketing and CI professionals in monitoring key partners and competitors.
Corporate Hierarchies – Family trees assist with lead-to-account mapping, selling deeper into an organization, and ensuring that leads are accurately scored and routed.
The Data Cloud consists of Demandbase, InsideView, and DemandMatrix assets. InsideView contributes close to 100 million global contacts and 17 million companies. DemandMatrix supports technographics (current tech stack, future technology needs, technology-based skill set trends, cloud consumption revenue, and IT Spend).
Other Data Cloud services include Demandbase Account Identification, InsideView Apex (ICP Discovery and Expansion), InsideView Data Integrity hygiene tools, and the InsideView API.
“For the last 15 years, we’ve been focused on empowering our customers to experience rapid revenue growth through the power of data. InsideView’s leadership in sales intelligence made it clear to us years ago that stronger ties between sales and marketing lead to more revenue—and data is the key. By joining forces with Demandbase, we’re combining our legacy and leadership in sales, and the industry’s freshest, most reliable data, with leading marketing technology. Our customers will be able to do more with data across more B2B revenue channels from sales, to advertising, to account-based campaigns. We’re taking the convergence of data and workflow to the next level.”
InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti
InsideView was highly rated in The Forrester Wave B2B Marketing Data Providers Q2 2021 report, scoring a five (highest score) across 14 of Forrester’s 24 evaluation criteria. Among the categories in which they excelled were data management, data coverage, and customer support.
Rogol emphasized the value of technographics for enterprise technology companies, saying that “for technology companies, the number one feature in a data science model is what technologies your prospect owns.”
“B2B data is complex, and customers consistently ask us for help with their data stack,” said DemandMatrix CEO Meetul Shah. “We started with further innovating technographic data to give customers valuable insights into their prospects and what other technologies they might buy. By now being part of the Demandbase Data Cloud, we’ll be able to provide customers access throughout the B2B data stack to help them realize their revenue goals.”
Both Milletti and Shah will continue running their respective businesses and join the Demandbase executive team as general managers. The two subsidiaries will operate separately, but the firm will consolidate the data across the offerings.
Acquisition prices for the two firms were not disclosed. The InsideView service lists its revenue at $30.5 million and 275 employees, which has remained stable over the past few years. DemandMatrix is listed at $3.0 million in revenue with 90 employees.
InsideView’s self-profile (May 4, 2021)
“At Demandbase, our vision is bold. We are transforming how B2B companies go to market, helping them deliver great experiences at every stage of the account journey. This requires great data,” said Demandbase. “We now have the premium B2B data and intelligence solutions to help companies identify, understand, and engage their customers and prospects. With this move, Demandbase goes from being ‘just’ a leader in account-based programs to being the definitive leader in B2B go-to-market.”
InsideView and DemandMatrix customers benefit from the more extensive go-to-market capabilities of their parent. The DemandMatrix suite helps customers:
Design and orchestrate their entire buyer’s journey across marketing and sales
Personalize their website experience, track account-level engagement, and attribute revenue
Deliver account-based display, native, and social media advertising that is brand safe for B2B
Target and segment their market
Rogol admitted that the integration work would not be easy. “Obviously, we still have a lot of the execution work ahead. One thing to point out is that these are different types of acquisitions than Engagio. With Engagio, the goal was to get to the most comprehensive ABM platform. These are adjacent expansions, so they’re going to operate as standalone businesses pretty much.”
Barb Mosher Zinck of Diginomica was bullish on the transactions, calling it a “smart move” to consolidate the data from three companies under a single platform. “It’s essentially a Customer Data Platform (CDP) without the CDP name (and some CDP capabilities), providing all the critical information sales and marketing need to find the right accounts and contacts within those accounts. The intelligence DemandMatrix brings on technology is key, as is the ability from InsideView to see when things are changing in a company.”
“I also like that Demandbase has broadened its offering from only account-based marketing to sales intelligence because the two groups are tightly aligned,” continued Mosher Zinck. “These two solutions can operate separately but bringing them together under the same umbrella with access to the same data is key to ensuring a company-wide focus on customer experience.”
The following Market Flash published on May 4th to my newsletter subscribers. I also offer a detailed InsideView product review for purchase ($349).
