Tag: DiscoverOrg

News Alert: DiscoverOrg Acquires RainKing

DO plus RK

Marketing and Sales Intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg acquired RainKing on Friday and announced it this afternoon.  Both firms employ large editorial teams for building and maintaining company and contact datasets and technology platform details (e.g. vendors, products, project plans).  This is the second acquisition of a competitor by DiscoverOrg which bought iProfile two summers ago and quickly integrated iProfile’s international coverage into the DiscoverOrg universe.

According to Inc., RainKing posted 2016 revenue of $33.9 million, up $6.9 million.  Combined, the two firms had 2016 revenue of $88.3 million and a 160% three-year growth rate.  The combined firm has an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in excess of $120 million.  DiscoverOrg’s 2016 end-of-year ARR was $71 million.

“The path to rapid revenue growth is paved with highly accurate, actionable, and predictive sales and marketing data, and the combination of RainKing and DiscoverOrg means that our joint customer base has access to an extraordinary portfolio of data, contextual buying insights, and predictive intelligence.  We are building a company that is to sales and marketing intelligence what Salesforce is to CRM.”

  • DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Shuck

The plan is to immediately merge their coverage into a single database delivered via both platforms.  RainKing customers will benefit from deeper coverage of non-IT execs (e.g. sales, marketing, HR, product management), the assignment of Customer Success Managers to their accounts, and access to DiscoverOrg’s TiLT training for SDRs.  DiscoverOrg users will benefit from deeper company and contact coverage, particularly in Europe, along with a larger editorial team building out and maintaining the combined database.  Both groups of customers will benefit from additional datasets in the DiscoverOrg research pipeline including a new one which will be announced in the next sixty days.

RainKing customers will continue on their current platform for at least a year until RainKing functionality is merged with that of DiscoverOrg.

The combined datasets will span over two million contacts and over 100,000 global companies.  As both firms maintain high quality data standards, DiscoverOrg’s 95% accuracy guarantee will be maintained.

The deal is a cash transaction, though DiscoverOrg did not reveal the price.

Schuck provides additional details on his vision for DiscoverOrg and the acquisition in this YouTube video:

GZ Consulting Take

I have been tracking DiscoverOrg and its CEO Henry Schuck for over a decade.  For a long time, I viewed them as a niche offering in the tech space competing against three other firms of roughly the same size (RainKing, iProfile, and SalesQuest).  Due to competition and the cost of editorial resources, I figured they would plateau in their market coverage below that of the Hoover’s editorial dataset of 43,000 companies.  With more exacting editorial standards and three direct competitors, it was difficult to see how the marginal cost of adding and maintaining the 40,000th profile was less than the marginal revenue for the 40,000th profile (Microeconomics 101 would contend that the rational firm would keep building additional profiles until MC = MR).

But I made several errors in my assumptions.  Most importantly, I built in the additional cost of editorially maintained content without properly understanding the value of the data to clients, particularly as DiscoverOrg and RainKing extended their functionality into the marketing department and added light predictive tools such as ranking and scoring of prospects.  Adding marketing and integration tools greatly increased the value of every profile within their databases and allowed clients to distribute the cost of licenses over both sales and marketing departments.  The advent of Big Data and Predictive Analytics also increased the value of high quality company and contact data within CRMs and MAPs.

DiscoverOrg and RainKing quickly outgrew their other competitors resulting in the acquisition of SalesQuest by Avention and iProfile by DiscoverOrg.  While other firms have entered the IT profiling market, they either focus on technographics (e.g. Datanyze, BuiltWith, HG Data) or remain much smaller (e.g. Corporate360).

Finally, the growth of ABM and a focus on top accounts increases the value of a top company database with rich targeting variables such as tech platforms and projects.  “As the market continues to move toward account-based engagement built on a deep understanding of buying centers, investing in high quality data has become even more critical,” opined John Donlon, Sr. Research Director at SiriusDecisions.  “Simply relying on information scraped from the web is not enough to succeed, but leveraging human-verified sales and marketing intelligence gives organizations a distinct advantage in all aspects of revenue generation.”

Initially, the merger is a win-win for the 4,000 DiscoverOrg and RainKing clients, immediately providing deeper company, contact, and technology opportunity coverage for their 70,000 clients.  It also provides a runway from which DiscoverOrg can quickly grow its coverage including RainKing’s new Federal IT dataset.  According to the firm, “Our roadmap is focused on accelerated data collection, deeper practical predictive intelligence, enhanced account-based marketing capabilities, and seamless data optimization and enrichment in CRM, marketing automation, and sales engagement tools.”

While DiscoverOrg could use the merger as an opportunity to raise prices, my guess is that prices will remain stable so that DiscoverOrg can position itself to take on sales and marketing intelligence vendors such as D&B Hoovers, InsideView, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Zoominfo.  However, if DiscoverOrg is going to become the Salesforce of sales and marketing intelligence, the firm needs to expand its non-IT content beyond executives to include strategic company and industry intelligence.  It is through the marriage of best-in-class executive intelligence (emails, direct dials, responsibilities, bios, social links, and org charts) with financials, filings, news, industry overviews, and SWOTs that DiscoverOrg will be able to go mano a mano with Dun & Bradstreet and LinkedIn in the broader sales intelligence market.  Under this scenario, DiscoverOrg can continue to build out its best-in-class content set while licensing non-core content from other vendors.

This has been a year of significant M&A activity which has reduced the number of sales intelligence datasets on the market.  Beyond DiscoverOrg/RainKing, Avention was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet to become their new D&B Hoovers platform (Dun & Bradstreet content fueling Avention’s functionality and connectors), Moody’s purchased Bureau van Dijk, Zoominfo was bought by PE firm Great Hill Partners, and Unomy was picked up by co-working company WeWork.  The result is the phase out of the old Hoovers platform, uncertainty about Bureau van Dijk’s commitment to its Mint sales platform, and the withdrawal of Unomy and RainKing from the market (they will continue on in the near term, but are no longer being marketed).  The future of Data.com is also in question as Salesforce has failed to announce a path forward for their AppExchange solution now that Dun & Bradstreet content is no longer available to new clients.

DiscoverOrg named “Great Place to Work”

DiscoverOrg was named a “Great Place to Work” with very high employee ratings for challenges, atmosphere, rewards, pride, communication, and bosses.  Employees lauded the firm for providing ‘the resources and equipment to do my job” (97%), management competence (95%), and recognition from management for “good work and extra effort” (93%).  Over the past year, the firm has grown employment by 39% to 353 employees and plans to add another 130 headcount in the coming twelve months.  DiscoverOrg has a 24% turnover rate over the past year.

“We built a culture that is based on making sure employees understand how their contribution drives the entire company forward,” said DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck. “It’s not all about ping pong tables, video games, and happy hours. We believe that employees love coming to work at DiscoverOrg because they appreciate seeing their contribution, believe we’re doing important work, and are more fulfilled achieving new goals and learning new skills.”

In other news, DiscoverOrg once again made the Inc. 5000 list with a three-year CAGR of 40%.  This is the seventh consecutive year DiscoverOrg made the list.  2016 revenue hit $59.4 million and is likely to make the list once again this year as their December 2016 ARR clocked in at $71 million.

DiscoverOrg made the Inc. 5000 list for the seventh consecutive year.
DiscoverOrg made the Inc. 5000 list for the seventh consecutive year.

DiscoverOrg LaunchPoint Connector

Sales and marketing intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg released an enhanced version of their Marketo LaunchPoint connector which cleanses, appends, and enriches Marketo leads with DiscoverOrg lead intelligence.  A one-click synch feature matches and enriches leads with account and contact data.  DiscoverOrg has very high quality global company and contact intelligence gathered by their team of 250 multi-lingual editors.

“What makes this service truly unique is the power of our live researchers who are continually adding to and maintaining our database.  It is also found in the flexibility of how and which data points are managed. Users can choose from up to 70 unique data points, decide which fields should be overwritten, and how often this sync occurs. Marketers are also alerted when duplicate entries are found, and given the option to keep the original or overwrite it.”

  • DiscoverOrg VP of Product Management & Product Marketing Justin Withers

Lead enrichment can be executed on day-one of deployment and then scheduled on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.  The connector helps marketers “more quickly and effectively score leads and pass a more accurate and comprehensive view of the prospect over to the sales team.”

“Clean data is fundamental to engaging in relevant and personalized conversations with buyers. The new enhancements to DiscoverOrg’s connector will enable marketers to enrich their marketing programs so that they’re engaging customers when, where, and how they want to build lasting relationships,” said Shai Alfandary, business development VP at Marketo.

DiscoverOrg Supports field level update rules within Marketo LaunchPoint.
DiscoverOrg Supports field level update rules within Marketo LaunchPoint.

The service now supports field-level update rules, providing greater control to Marketo administrators over which fields are to be updated and when.  Thus, fields can be enriched upon creation, update, or only if the field is empty. 

DiscoverOrg also compares emails against its “database of known bounces” and replaces bad emails with verified email addresses.

“Dirty data leads to incredible challenges for the entire organization,” said DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck.  “When bad data ruins a company’s reputation and lands a domain on blacklists, marketers put growth for the entire company in jeopardy. With these new features, customers are able to immediately improve the health of their marketing database – so that they can spend time creating revenue-generating programs, not worrying about whether bad data will sabotage their efforts,” says Henry Schuck, CEO of DiscoverOrg.

Artesian CEO on Sales Intelligence and being “Customer Curious”

The Artesian Solution Watchlist tags stories by trigger topics and allows users to filter by both triggers and topic cloud keywords.
The Artesian Solution Watchlist tags stories by trigger topics and allows users to filter by both triggers and topic cloud keywords.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates and discuss topics including how they fit into the sales intelligence space and being “customer curious.”  Artesian provides a social selling solution for the UK, US, and Canada.  Their sales intelligence is delivered via a web browser, Salesforce.com, and their Ready mobile app.

This is the third interview excerpt.  Earlier this week, I posted blogs concerning Artesian’s 2016 US market entry and how artificial intelligence fits in the Artesian roadmap.

Michael: How do you view yourself versus firms in the sales intelligence space?

Andrew: I had a chat with [CEO] Henry [Schuck] from DiscoverOrg just recently. It took us a while to realize that we didn’t really compete with DiscoverOrg. We might compete for share of wallet.  Certainly, some of the words on the website are saying [similar things]. Fundamentally, we’re two different types of organizations.

I think there are companies that make data, curate data, sell access to curated data. I would include in addition to DiscoverOrg, RainKing and InsideView.

I talked to Henry. I said, “Somebody would buy your service because they would want to get the inside track on when the projects are coming up, on particular types of initiatives. Who’s who in the zoo? What’s their phone number and email address?” The stimulus would be, “I’m contacting you to talk to you about this project on which I can help you.” [That’s] The bit where we take over guiding the conversations which follow over the remainder of the sales cycle, we can do that.

We use natural language processing, machine-based learning and AI to take data from people who already aggregate it. Then we take it through our own process because there isn’t anything out there that has anything like the superior capabilities we’ve got around topic classification, tagging, and all the things that go with our value proposition. As I said to Henry, “We’re never really going to compete directly because we’ve got no intention of hiring a bunch of people to build various specific data.”

I think he’s on fire at the moment…In the States, there’s a real shortage of quality contact insight. Where we take over is where DiscoverOrg leaves off. At the point where you’ve identified an opportunity in a customer and then you want to build that relationship and keep that relationship going over time not just maybe sell them one product or service but sell them multiple products or services and keep going back. That’s the area we’re really, really good at.

Michael: Okay. Right, so basically being aware of what’s going on in that organization and maintaining the relationship.

Andrew: Yes. That’s why we look for organizations, customers that we sell to who have a relationship management model at their heart. This “customer curious” concept came from one of our customers, NetApp. The chap that was running Europe came up with the phrase. He drew me this picture and said, “There’s three ways we can differentiate ourselves in the market. We can differentiate ourselves with products,” he said. “And NetApp’s got the same product that three or four other companies have got. We can do it with price, but that’s a race to the bottom or we can do it with service. We want to do it with service, and we want to be the best. The best company in this space. We can have a product that is good or better than anyone else’s, but we’ll differentiate ourselves by being customer curious.”

There’s nothing like getting inspiration for where your headed from a customer.

Michael: This topic is near and dear to Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff: being customer obsessed.

Andrew: Yes. Being customer obsessed is where we try to complement Mark Benioff’s vision.  The Salesforce platform is an excellent system of record, and I think people buy CRM expecting it to help them sell, and it does. It helps them sell by getting more organized and orchestrated with the customer at the center, but it’s not a system of engagement. That’s really where we feel we come in as a complement and supplement to that system of record.

The interview will wrap up on Monday with a discussion of how Artesian maintains a very high engagement rate amongst its users.

DiscoverOrg Startup & SMB Dataset

"Building a Winning Dataset" from DiscoverOrg Collateral.
“Building a Winning Dataset” from DiscoverOrg Collateral.

Sales and Marketing intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg announced their latest database earlier today.  The new Startup and SMB dataset covers more than 60,000 small and mid-size businesses and 400,000 executives.  The initial North American coverage profiles companies with between 50 and 1,000 employees.

All of the contacts are editorially verified and will be maintained via the same sixty-day review cycles as their other contacts.  Executives cover “all key departments, including IT, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Operations.”

“DiscoverOrg’s data difference is its team of 250+ researchers who constantly augment and verify the data in our platform,” notes Henry Schuck, DiscoverOrg CEO. “Unlike other vendors that provide SMB lists with thousands of irrelevant contacts, companies, and incomplete and duplicate records, the DiscoverOrg Startup & SMB dataset is as rich and accurate as our enterprise data.”

CMO Katie Bullard said that DiscoverOrg has “aggressive plans” to invest in SMB dataset development due to customer benefits.

With more companies, our researchers won’t have to skip over Triggers that they find through their research. We’re able to return a greater number of companies that use a certain technology, and our predictive tools like AccountView and DealPredict have larger reach with more matched accounts.

  • DiscoverOrg CMO Katie Bullard

The initial dataset is limited to North America as that is where they have the greatest current demand, but DiscoverOrg plans to internationalize the Startup and SMB dataset in the future.  While the goal is to cover all firms with at least 50 employees, the initial dataset consists of firms requested by their customers.

The press release noted how difficult it is to find reliable, actionable intelligence for SMB sales teams.  Along with company and executive profiles, the database provides 6,000 “research verified buying triggers” per month.

In smaller businesses without media coverage or press releases, almost none of the buying intent triggers that DiscoverOrg gathers – including planned investments, key projects, personnel moves, and internal spending budgets – is made available to the public. This is where DiscoverOrg’s team of researchers provides a clear advantage: While there are millions of registered companies in the US, the difficulty is identifying and gathering intelligence on the small percentage of these companies who are 1) legitimate entities and 2) have true spend / budget. By continuously verifying contact info, conducting interviews, and engaging in research activities, DiscoverOrg overcomes the shortcomings of web-scraping for hard-to-find data on the SMB space, ensuring the intelligence customers receive is highly relevant and immediately useful.

  • DiscoverOrg Press Release

“Sales and marketing teams that want to reach the SMB market have had a very difficult go of it,” said Nancy Nardin, President of advisory firm Smart Selling Tools. “There’s been a real dearth of verified, accurate data on SMBs, quite simply because it’s harder for data companies to get. DiscoverOrg is solving for this very real pain point by bringing their best-in-class research verification model to the SMB space. You can expect the same high-quality data you get from DiscoverOrg’s broad datasets. ”

Across all databases, DiscoverOrg now covers 1.5 million executives and 90,000 companies.  Customers may purchase access to the full database or various databases by job function, company size, or region.

 

DiscoverOrg Data Quality Put to the Test

DiscoverOrg contact and firmographic intelligence displayed within SFDC.
DiscoverOrg contact and firmographic intelligence displayed within Salesforce.com.

Sales Trainer Steve W. Martin recently ran an independent study of DiscoverOrg contact data quality which found that the vendor lives up to its high quality data claims and SLA.  According to Martin, “DiscoverOrg had no foreknowledge that I was measuring their data accuracy and no influence over the sample data set I used.”

Martin randomly selected 100 contacts from a file of 10,000 and conducted the study himself.  He evaluated seven fields and found very high data quality levels:

  • Full Name Accuracy was 99%, including spelling.
  • Contact Company name was 98%
  • Title Accuracy was 96%
  • LinkedIn URL accuracy was 97%.  The three contacts that lacked LinkedIn URLs confirmed that they did not have LinkedIn profiles.
  • Seniority Level accuracy was 100%
  • 97% of the emails were deliverable with only a 3% bounce rate.  As contacts decay at a 2% rate per month, 97% is at the upper end of expectations.
  • Twitter Handles were correct 100% of the time, but only 10% of the contacts had the field populated.

With the exception of Twitter handles where there is likely a significant underpopulation of the field, the dataset lived up to its 95% SLA and data quality claims.  It should be noted that Martin did not evaluate DiscoverOrg’s technographics, org chart relationships, responsibility data, or event alerts.  These are other areas where their editorial data distinguishes the firm.

“This study confirms what I have personally heard from a wide cross-section of the technology companies I work with,” said Martin.  “DiscoverOrg provides highly accurate contact data. In addition, this study was based on a small subset of the data that DiscoverOrg provides. Of primary importance to my clients are the detailed IT organization charts, the identification of the different technologies installed, recent trigger events such as personnel changes, and the direct phone numbers of contacts.”

These types of studies are often expensive to conduct and difficult to construct when comparing vendors.  I performed similar studies as internal benchmarks when I worked at OneSource (now D&B Hoovers) and for clients since becoming a consultant and no vendors approach this level of data quality (Note: I have never evaluated RainKing which utilizes similar data collection methods).  What is clear is that the smaller universe, editorially-crafted DiscoverOrg file of 60,000 companies and 1 1/2 million contacts clearly has higher contact data quality than other vendors (again, excluding RainKing).  When discussing DiscoverOrg and RainKing with clients, I describe them as using traditional artisanal research methods which entail focusing on a smaller universe of companies and contacts at these companies.  This approach makes for a strong fit for firms employing an ABM approach to target large accounts, but may be insufficient for more transactional marketing approaches which are more sales development and demand generation focused.  Both cost and lack of coverage of SMBs would be issues at those firms.

“Bad data is costly and can be the single point of failure in an otherwise successful campaign,” says the firm on their website.  “We don’t just pay lip-service to the quality of our data. We contractually guarantee it. We know that success in every sales and marketing effort begins with highly accurate, verified data that your team can trust.”

What is clear is that this quality-centric approach to gathering data has proven successful.  Both RainKing and DiscoverOrg have high growth rates and regular Inc. 5000 membership.  DiscoverOrg closed last year with $71 million in annualized recurring revenue so is almost assured of making the Inc. list for the seventh year in a row.

Martin published his results online as a PDF.

DiscoverOrg Tellwise Connector

DiscoverOrg released its latest Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) connector with the rollout of a Tellwise integration.  Joint customers will be able to pass DiscoverOrg intelligence to Tellwise.  The Tellwise service supports a broad set of ABSD features along with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Chrome, Outlook, and Gmail integrations.  DiscoverOrg is their first content provider integration, but they plan to add others in the future.

Tellwise was founded four years ago by former Microsoft engineers.  According to their CEO Conrad Bayer, their goal is to unify sales communications across channels with respect to user experience, flow, data synchronization, and analytics. The long term mission is to create an omni-channel platform designed for the seller that makes them more effective through higher volume and better insights.

Much of the activity within Tellwise is managed through a Google Chrome extension.  This allows users to operate within other platforms for most of the service’s functionality.  Features include a phone dialer, email templates, prospect chat, presentation tools, and an activity feed.  The system creates personal landing pages for each linked document, allowing Tellwise to track attachments.  These links also provide a mechanism for sending an on-demand chat message to a prospect or for presenting materials.  The system notifies sales reps when documents are being read, providing an opportunity to chat with the prospect or share a presentation.

“Productivity for outbound sales reps is driven by their ability to get accurate contact data and an effective way to communicate and measure activity with those contacts. That is what is so exciting about this partnership between DiscoverOrg and Tellwise.  We are solving two of the most challenging sales problems at the same time. DO provides world class data and Tellwise provides a world class communication platform right from within DiscoverOrg. So far, we have seen this new integration double the effectiveness of our mutual customers,” said Bayer.

DiscoverOrg with the Tellwise Chrome extension opened in the right-hand panel.
DiscoverOrg with the Tellwise Chrome extension opened in the right-hand panel.

Tellwise has a novel mechanism for transferring data from DiscoverOrg to its platform and CRMs.  Instead of downloading a file or running a batch synch, Tellwise users open up the Chrome Browser extension and the current prospecting list is automatically populated as a list within the Chrome extension.  Users can then act on individual leads or take group actions.  It is only when one or multiple records have an action taken (e.g. Place call, Send batch email) that records are synched between DiscoverOrg, Tellwise, and the CRM.

The combination of Tellwise and DiscoverOrg’s technologies enables SDRs to have access to highly accurate contact information and intelligence on their prospects at exactly the right moment they need to engage with them – allowing for more meaningful connections to occur, in the most appropriate forums, and before competitors can get their foot in the door

  • DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck

Unlike other ABSD vendors, Tellwise does not have a full service cadence/sequence tool, but it has a Tasks tool in beta which provides multi-platform scheduled activities.  The service also lacks a transcription service for calls, but they are working on transcription and sentiment analysis for later this year.

Tellwise pricing ranges between $29 and $79 per month.

Tellwise Pricing
Tellwise Pricing

DiscoverOrg also offers ABSD partnerships with SalesLoft and Outreach.  According to DiscoverOrg, Sales Development Reps can “build highly-segmented prospect lists based on their list of target accounts and buyer personas and push those contacts into streamlined and automated sequences of interactions with their prospects.”

DiscoverOrg AccountView ICP Tool

Intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg announced a new Account Based Marketing (ABM) tool called AccountView which helps marketers identify the attributes of their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).  The new feature analyzes an account file which it calls a portfolio, enriches it with firmographics and technographics, and then provides a portfolio visualization dashboard of the accounts.  The service also identifies similar companies to the top accounts, prioritizes them, and identifies best fit decision-makers at the net-new accounts.

The AccountView Dashboard provides firmographic and technographic segmentation analysis.
The AccountView Dashboard provides firmographic and technographic segmentation analysis.

The portfolio segmentation dashboard tiles include

  • Size: Revenue and Employee Bar Charts
  • Industry: Primary Industry Pie Chart; SIC and NAICS top frequency lists
  • Technology: Technology lists
  • Ownership: Ownership Structure Pie Chart
  • Companies: Portfolio companies with employee and revenue data.  Company names are hyperlinked to their DiscoverOrg profiles.

Although geographic segmentation is not yet available, it is on the product roadmap.

Within the list tiles, users can search for specific elements (i.e. SIC, NAICS, technology, or company name).

Proposed contacts are shown within org charts with direct dial phones and emails to assist with organizational context and reach out.  DiscoverOrg also provides detailed platform information and a set of sales triggers.

Marketing and sales teams can drill into specific bars or wedges to further research segments.  To quickly refine models, customers can remove outliers to focus the ICP around high frequency variables.

Company Lists include DealPredict Scores and Lightning Bolt Alert Flags.
Company Lists include DealPredict Scores and Lightning Bolt Alert Flags.

Portfolios may be uploaded as CSV files, bulk matched within DiscoverOrg, or generated via DiscoverOrg prospecting.  Result lists may be saved as lists, viewed as searches, or exported to CSV files.  Models may also be loaded into DealPredict where company lists are displayed with Deal Predict scores of zero to five stars.  Next to DealPredict scores, DiscoverOrg displays a lightning bolt icon if the company has a Sales Trigger or OppAlerts in the past sixty days.  OppAlerts are intent based triggers which have been researched by DiscoverOrg editors or gathered through B2B publishers’ online content consumption data.  By clicking on the lightning bolt, reps are shown the related events.

Within DealPredict, company lists are dynamically maintained to reflect the current firmographic and technographic lists of companies.  If there is a change in company size or implemented technology, the DealPredict scores are automatically updated every time a search is conducted.  Likewise, companies which are added to the DiscoverOrg database are automatically scored.

The very foundation of successful sales and marketing is figuring out who your best customers are, understanding why they are the best, and finding more prospects just like them.  What could be a painful analytical exercise is made simple and straightforward with DiscoverOrg’s account-based marketing features, and the result is faster growth for customers who can more effectively identify, understand, and engage with their ideal buyer.

  • DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck

DiscoverOrg suggests a number of account list categories that can be analyzed including the full customer list, high or low spend customers, renewing or non-renewing customers, high or low profitability customers, competitor customer lists, and prospect accounts.  For example, running a competitor’s customer profile through AccountView helps you “determine ways to improve your product, messaging, or positioning.  Likewise, running the non-renewed customer list through AccountView will help identify high-churn candidates for special programs.

Although DiscoverOrg recommends sets of strong and weak account lists, AccountView does not have the ability to discriminate between the two categories.  Thus, marketers would need to separately run the paired lists, compare the portfolio results, and adjust the models for overlapping variables.  For example, knowing that Microsoft Office is heavily used by both strong and weak accounts would indicate that MS Office is a frequently occurring, but non-predictive variable.

Future features include support for multiple models, grouping tech functions by category, sharing models across all users, geographic segmentation reports, and uploading contact information to assist with defining job functions and levels.

AccountView is the latest capability within DiscoverOrg’s ABM Toolkit.  Other features include DiscoverOrg’s DealPredict predictive rankings for companies and contacts, OppAlerts intent-based opportunities, and sales triggers.

DealPredict provides predictive scores similar to those provided by predictive analytics companies.  DiscoverOrg CMO Katie Bullard noted that unlike some black-box predictive platforms, AccountView analysis and DealPredict models are fully visible to sales and marketing users.

The AccountView analytics and net-new account service is included as part of the DiscoverOrg service.  Firms license access to specific DiscoverOrg datasets and a set number of seats.  Licensed users then have unlimited access to the licensed content for viewing, uploading, or downloading.

Other sales intelligence companies that have developed AccountView-like functionality include Dun & Bradstreet (Workbench), Avention (DataVision), and Zoominfo (Growth Acceleration Platform).

DiscoverOrg, which hit $71 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) at the end of 2016, has expanded its customer base beyond technology companies.  Over 15% of revenues now come from marketing agencies, staffing firms, and consultancies.

DiscoverOrg is one of fourteen vendors covered in my “2017 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors“.

Sales Intelligence Vendors Move Upstream

ZoomInfo Personas provide a multi-dimensional cluster analysis for identifying persona categories and prospecting against them.
ZoomInfo Personas provide a multi-dimensional cluster analysis for identifying persona categories and prospecting against them.

Five years ago, Sales Intelligence vendors avoided selling into the marketing  department.  While there were a few enrichment projects for CRMs, these were driven by Sales Ops, not marketing departments.  Furthermore, SalesTech products are sold on a per seat basis for sales reps while marketing revenue is generally volume based (e.g. number of prospecting records sold or records enriched).  This made pricing of services difficult.

But MarTech was receiving heavy investments and several firms shifted their focus from sales to marketing.  Zoominfo began discussing Sales and Marketing Alignment and developed a set of marketing tools.  The firm, which had been struggling to grow revenue for several years, is again on a growth trajectory and made the two most recent Inc. 5000 lists.

InsideView also began developing marketing functionality and now treats the two departments equally.  Most of InsideView’s recent investment has been in building out marketing solutions or expanding their company and contact coverage (which benefits sales and marketing equally).

At the beginning of 2015, Dun & Bradstreet acquired NetProspex for its contact database and Workbench hygiene platform.  The firm also used NetProspex as the basis for their Audience Solutions programmatic marketing service which was launched in 2015.

In 2016, the Sales Intelligence vendors continued to move upstream into marketing intelligence and hygiene.  InsideView continues to enhance its Target, Enrich, and Refresh marketing tools while Avention launched OneSource DataVision for web form enrichment, continuous enrichment, segmentation, look-a-like prospecting, and TAM analysis.  Avention also launched Marketo and Eloqua connectors for their OneSource service.

“OneSource DataVision naturally extends the sales and marketing benefits our customers can gain from OneSource Solutions by being even more targeted with campaigns and programmes – including account-based,” said Avention SVP of Product Lauren Bakewell. “Better qualified leads and more targeted account-based approaches should bring better sales results, which should in turn strengthen sales and marketing alignment; we feel alignment happens best when sales forecasts are being met and exceeded!”

Zoominfo has repositioned itself as a MarTech company with a rebranding of their platform as the Zoominfo Growth Acceleration Platform.  While sales reps are still supported, the emphasis is on data enrichment, segmentation analysis, cluster analysis, and look-a-like prospecting against clusters.

DiscoverOrg and RainKing also placed greater emphasis upon marketing and ABM capabilities.  Both services support predictive rankings of accounts and contacts, MAP and CRM enrichment, and new opportunities (Inside Scoops from RainKing and OppAlerts and sales triggers from DiscoverOrg).

In 2017 and 2018, expect the walls between SalesTech and MarTech to crumble.  The opportunity to offer a solution for both departments via a shared reference database will continue to drive strategy at these firms.  As MarTech begins to consolidate, expect M&A activity within the sector and vertically with SalesTech vendors.

Sales Intelligence vendors have key assets that benefit marketing departments including large company and contact datasets for prospecting and enrichment; firmographic data for lead scoring, targeting, segmentation, and routing; and the growing ability to tie leads to accounts in real-time.  They are also well positioned to support ABM functionality with profiling, analytics (segmentation, Total Addressable Market analysis), and look-a-like prospecting.

Of course, MarTech is also beginning to eye SalesTech.  Last spring, Demandbase acquired Spiderbook and leveraged its capabilities to launch their DemandGraph relationship dataset.  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.

Demandbase DemandGraph
Demandbase DemandGraph

Meanwhile, the predictive analytics companies, which originally focused on lead scoring, are now building sales functionality including net-new contacts at accounts, account prioritization, flagging churn candidates,  and providing recommendations for sales reps.

Things are just beginning to get interesting.

ABM and High Growth Companies

Account Based Strategy Adoption Rates (DiscoverOrg and Smart Selling Tools)
Account Based Strategy Adoption Rates (DiscoverOrg and Smart Selling Tools)

A joint study by DiscoverOrg and Smart Selling Tools of 200 sales and marketing organizations found that high growth companies with at least 40% growth over the past three years are 2.5 times more likely to have adopted an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy.  Furthermore high growth companies are twice as likely to have successful cold calling programs and are more likely to have a dedicated outbound prospecting team.  High growth firms are also more likely to hire sales reps based upon their “tech-savvy” than experience and have adopted twice as many sales technologies than their slower growth brethren.  With respect to MarTech, high-growth companies have adopted 24% more marketing solutions.

The study also found that fast growth companies provide at least three hours of coaching or training per week to their sales teams.  At slower growth companies, training appeared to have less of an effect.  According to the report, “While an increase in training hours correlated with a rise in growth rates for the high growth group, it did not with low growth companies. This suggests that training may not in of itself cause growth, but it is critical in sustaining it. Fast growing organizations need to train constantly to maintain momentum and enable teams to perform at a high level. Companies that err on the side of less training and coaching do not appear to set their teams up for the same level of success.”

“The findings clearly demonstrate that achieving fast growth is not as simple as having a great product and hiring experienced sales reps.  Sales and marketing teams that are true revenue-generating engines take risks and do the hard things – like cold calling, focusing on data quality, and heavily aligning sales and marketing teams across account-based strategies.”

– DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck

“Technology proliferation in the sales and marketing industry is both a challenge and an opportunity,” added  Nancy Nardin, CEO of Smart Selling Tools. “The fastest growing companies are investing in technologies that make their sales and marketing teams more productive and more insightful, while recognizing it is equally as important to have highly trained team members who know how to leverage that technology to its fullest power.”

The primary inhibitor of even faster growth at high growth companies was data quality issues concerning accounts and contacts.

The top technology available to sales reps were CRM (52%) and LinkedIn (free LinkedIn was deployed at 45% , premium LinkedIn at 33%, and Sales Navigator at 27% of sales teams).  Pipeline and Opportunity Management software was third at 42%.  Rounding out the top five were compensation/commission software and sales intelligence, both with a 38% deployment rate.  Surprisingly, 37% of sales teams still employ account and contact data providers / list providers.  As sales intelligence vendors support list building along with sales intelligence (and some also data hygiene), there are likely ongoing opportunities to move sales teams up the value chain from list purchases.

Predictive analytics / predictive intelligence placed 36th out of 37 technologies with only a 5% deployment rate.  As Gartner estimated the total global market for predictive analytics technology to be between $100 and $150 million, this low penetration rate should not be overly surprising.

The study, conducted in November, used 40% growth between 2013 and 2016 (estimated) as the high growth cutoff as it is represents the recent growth floor for Inc. 5000 membership.  Of the 200 firms studied, 17% fell into the high-growth category, 69% fell into the low-growth category (1-39%), 13% had flat revenue, and 1% had declining revenues.  The survey was over weighted to technology companies with software, IT Services and Telco as the top three industries surveyed.  82% of the firms were B2B and 85% were headquartered in the US.