Tag: DiscoverOrg

Data Quality Isn’t Glamorous — Now Get over It

The Data Health Scan Report is one of the Optimized Customer Data Services.
A Data Quality report is an excellent way to start a data quality program.  It helps with sizing the problem and providing an initial remediation cost.

Unfortunately, data quality is a boring topic. No new CMO has ever joined a company and said, “First, let’s perform a merge/purge on our account and contact records, standardize the fields, and enrich the records.” (OK, I’m being hyperbolic, there may have been a few). No, they want a shiny new marketing automation platform, new branding, and an advertising campaign that gets the company noticed.

Sadly, there is little glory in improving your marketing database — unless, of course, you want to improve your lead nurturing, scoring, segmentation, routing, and sales ready lead quality.

Quality is generally seen as a cost center but it can just as easily be viewed as a cost saver. Bad quality erodes your marketing effectiveness, hurts your brand, kicks the knees out from under your nascent big data experiments, and demoralizes sales reps. A bad company or contact record is like a virus propagated from system to system raising the cost over time.

Furthermore, how can you think about predictive analytics when your databases are rife with bad, incomplete, and out of date records?

Bad data isn’t simply a mistyped address. It’s also:

  • Missing lead firmographics making it difficult to nurture, score, route, and qualify leads.
  • Invalid emails that hurt your deliverability scores and decrease the likelihood your messages will be delivered to inboxes instead of spam folders.
  • Junk fields on web forms because the individual didn’t want to fill out a dozen fields to read your whitepaper.
  • Large gaps in your segmentation analysis labeled UNKNOWN.
  • Hosting costs for storing out of date and duplicate data.
  • Leads with missing linkage that were held for nurture because the marketing automation system didn’t know the location was a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company.
  • Poor marketing messaging and targeting that tell the recipient that you know nothing about their business, job function, industry, or company size.

Finally, bad lead quality incentivizes sales reps to ignore leads because marketing never seems to send the “Glengarry” leads. Instead, they become demoralized as they call invalid phone numbers or find that the contact “doesn’t work here anymore”.

Henry Schuck, CEO of DiscoverOrg, describes the situation well:

Sifting through crappy leads as a sales person is incredibly demoralizing. Their commission – which often translates into their ability to save for their family’s future, have disposable income or cover their mortgage and car payments – depends on them being able to close business. Their ability to close business, in turn, depends solely on their ability to find, set appointments with, and CLOSE new opportunities. If the leads provided by your company will not help them do that – how does that feel? They just moved companies to come work for you and their future is uncertain, at best.

So look at data quality holistically. Address it at the front end in your call centers and web forms and then enrich and maintain your database over time. As contact records decay at a 25% rate per annum you need to view data quality as an ongoing process, not simply an annual refresh (which is more than many companies even do).

So by flipping your perspective, it is easy to find myriad tangible benefits which justify the cost of data quality programs. It may not lead to glory, but by recognizing the distributed costs of bad data and then remediating them, you can generate significant ROI.

Photo Credit: Data Hygiene report from Dun & Bradstreet NetProspex Workbench

DiscoverOrg Announces Growth Investment Round

GZ Consulting Financial Figures Gathered from DiscoverOrg Revenue Announcements.
GZ Consulting financial figures gathered from DiscoverOrg revenue announcements.

This morning, tech sales intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg announced its second funding round to assist the company’s growth. Investors included Goldman Sachs BDC, NXT Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and Antares Management. In 2014, DiscoverOrg quietly accepted a growth equity investment from TA Associates and FiveW Capital. The firm did not disclose the size of either round but told The Columbian that the current round was at least a seven digit investment.*

CEO Henry Schuck said that the round did not fall into traditional Series A / Series B designations as it was not designed to address financial needs so much as bring in a set of strategic advisors to help guide company growth. Shuck noted that the firm has long been managed as a cash flow positive operation; thus, the funding rounds were not needed to fund growth but for garnering “seasoned technology and SaaS” expertise.

A secondary benefit of these relationships is they improve the company’s flexibility with respect to acquisitions. In the press release, the firm noted the opportunity to acquire firms in adjacent markets. DiscoverOrg acquired competitor iProfile last year and integrated their international datasets into their core database.

DiscoverOrg continues to build out its datasets. They recently announced their Technology, Engineering, Development, and Design (TEDD) offering which focuses on product management. Other datasets in development include sales and HR departments. A rest of world dataset covering AsiaPac and Latin America is also being readied for market.

Other priorities include doubling their engineering department to forty headcount so they can “build new workflow automation capabilities and integrations for sales and marketing professionals,” and “rapidly expanding” their IT, Marketing and Finance datasets.

“As companies continue to invest in CRM, marketing automation, predictive lead scoring and analytics, they’re realizing that the linchpin to achieving high ROI on these investments is not just having a core system but also adding in verified, high quality data that sales and marketing professionals can leverage to build pipeline and close deals,” said Schuck.

“We invested in technology, we rebuilt the platform from front to back, added integrations with marketing automation systems and CRM and rebuilt the front-end of the Salesforce app,” he added. “We are looking at the technology as more than a delivery mechanism for the data and have it more in the workflow of sales reps.”

DiscoverOrg continues its growth trajectory with topline revenue up 36% in 2015. Their annual recurring revenue now stands at $54 million and Schuck forecasts 40% to 60% revenue growth in 2016. DiscoverOrg is approaching 2,000 customers and has grown to 230 employees.

The firm no longer appears to be allergic to employing digital data collection methods so long as digital data serves as an input to their editorial processes. Shuck noted that the combination of digitally collected data with human verification “would be very powerful.” Shuck gained confidence in such techniques due to success using digital tools for identifying and verifying emails. Their recent experience of verifying the iProfile dataset demonstrated their capability to ingest large third-party datasets and verify the content.

They also recently announced a partnership to license vendor and product data from HG Data. HG Data covers many more companies than DiscoverOrg, so they focused on improving technology fill rates at their current companies. The firm conducted verification tests on the HG Data content and leveraged HG Data’s confidence scores. Of course, the HG Data content also provides seed data for building out new company profiles.

Expanding their data collection methods makes logical sense. While there is a certain purity to editorial only content, leveraging digital data generation and verification techniques allows the firm to focus editorial resources on difficult to obtain high-value datasets such as organizational charts while building out their company and contact coverage more rapidly.

DiscoverOrg also recently partnered with SalesLoft to upload DiscoverOrg contacts into the Cadence product. Sales reps can upload one or multiple records to specific cadences, allowing the reps to immediately begin campaigns. DiscoverOrg also supports an auto-refresh feature to maintain data quality over time.

SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter argued that “What we’re seeing on the front end is a dramatic increase in the quality and quantity of intelligence on companies — the things that DiscoverOrg creates. We can help from there, via fine-grained analytics, which provide information on the right amount of calls, emails, and social contacts to make as well as the best time to execute those touchpoints.”

While the company offers a set of IT, marketing, and finance datasets on its website, they are flexible in their licensing. Firms can bundle multiple datasets or target companies by location or technology sets.

Although DiscoverOrg on the sales and marketing function, they have a sizeable business in the executive recruitment space with over 250 clients. DiscoverOrg supports two sets of recruitment use cases: staffing and business development (identifying HR contacts at target companies). The firm has also had success selling into HR departments, particularly at large financial services companies. By targeting staff at competitors, financial services companies can bring in seasoned professionals with a knowledge of their industry.

Schuck sees a strong future for DiscoverOrg as they find additional was to sell their datasets across user workflows and departments. A recent study estimated their IT Total Addressable Market (TAM) to be in excess of $1 billion. The marketing dataset was deemed to be a comparable opportunity while the finance market was sized at $400 million.

* Correction: The Columbian corrected their wording to read “at least” a seven digit investment.

 

 

 

Not All C-Level Executives Can Be Found in LinkedIn

C-Level Gap Rates on LinkedIn
Partial Display of DiscoverOrg Research on C-Level Population Rates on LinkedIn

A 2015 DiscoverOrg survey of C-level executives found that 25% of top-level execs cannot be located on LinkedIn.  The most accessible industries were health products (e.g. pharmaceuticals, medical devices), professional services (e.g. legal, professional services), and financial services (e.g. banking, insurance, financial services) while the least accessible executives worked for state or federal governments and resource extraction industries (e.g. oil and gas, mining).  Thirty-seven percent of top-level federal officials cannot be found on LinkedIn while only eighteen percent of legal execs cannot be located on the professional social media site.  The technology sector execs tended slightly below the mean with rates between 23% and 25%.

Even if an exec is on LinkedIn, it does not mean that he or she actively uses the site, provides contact information, or responds to InMail requests (plain text messages that can easily be confused with SPAM).  Thus, targeting execs via LinkedIn may be insufficient to reach them.  Sales reps targeting C-level execs will likely need to employ other sales intelligence platforms for direct contact information.  Furthermore, LinkedIn also does not allow users to send company and contact information to CRMs.  Thus, users have to copy / paste or rekey information, an overhead task that most other sales intelligence services handle automatically.

Another shortcoming is the lack of detailed company information for account planning.  Organizational profiles tend to consist of repurposed website and Facebook content with little original company content.

LinkedIn is excellent for tracking colleagues, maintaining professional relationships, personal brand building, and researching executives.  As such, it should be part of every B2B sales reps’ arsenal (at least the free version); however, due to content and functional gaps, LinkedIn should be viewed as a high-value complement to other sales intelligence services and not a direct replacement of them.

DiscoverOrg TEDD Dataset Released

TEDD Advertisement from DiscoverOrg's website.
TEDD advertisement from the DiscoverOrg website.

DiscoverOrg recently announced their TEDD (Technology, Engineering, Design, and Development) dataset which focuses on externally oriented product functions versus the internally oriented IT department.  Content includes TEDD execs with direct contact information, org charts, and purchase intent.

DiscoverOrg noted that TEDD contacts may not have a “public facing presence” making it more difficult to identify them from company websites and social profiles. Database titles include Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Data Scientist, Software Engineer, VP of Software Engineering, VP of Product Engineering, VP of Development Operations, and VP of Product Development.

“With our new TEDD dataset, we’re helping address one of the biggest sales challenges today: finding and accessing those responsible for technology product and application development,” said DiscoverOrg CEO Henry Schuck. “We level the playing field so that any company now has the ability to get their products and solutions in front of the right people.”

Other DiscoverOrg datasets include the IT Department (their largest set of contacts), Finance, and Marketing.  While company and contact coverage are still over weighted to North America, the firm has been moving to internationalize their scope and now offer a European dataset.  They are likely to be announcing AsiaPac coverage in 2016 based upon content included in last summer’s iProfile acquisition.

DiscoverOrg did not publish pricing or initial database counts for their TEDD offering.

Note: DiscoverOrg is one of the eleven vendors covered in my 2015 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors.

DiscoverOrg: Closing Out Another Year of Growth

DO Chrome

Technology Sales Intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg closed out another year of significant growth in customers, product, content, and revenue.  “DiscoverOrg saw significant advancements in its workforce, physical locations, data insight, product development, and market share,” blogged the company.  “In the process, we are creating jobs, establishing a stronger presence, and delivering more product value to customers.  As DiscoverOrg succeeds, we are primed to level the playing field in business-to-business sales and marketing … to help small companies grow into big companies … to create a global revolution in B2B sales.”

Amongst the growth metrics they published on their blog:

  • Customer accounts increased 36 percent.
  • Platform users increased by 17 percent.
  • Search queries increased from 721,862 in 2014 to 733,277 in 2015.

The firm discussed three of their 2015 objectives: strategic hires, physical presence, and greater data insight.

In 2015, the firm added 93 employees, nearly doubling their staff to 203.  Hiring centered around their research team as “data accuracy is a top focus”.  Some of this growth was from the mid-summer acquisition of iProfile, but the majority was organic hiring.

2015 hires included a new SVP of Customer Success and CFO.  The firm also added three new Board Members including the former COO of Forrester Research and the former CEO of Capital IQ.

Along with moving into larger facilities in Vancouver, Washington (20 miles from Portland), they opened satellite facilities in Gaithersburg, Maryland and Philadelphia.

2015 also saw significant database growth and new product offerings.  The iProfile acquisition helped accelerate their global build out.  The database grew by more than 50% with the marketing dataset growing by 85%.  During 2015 they added datasets for finance and Europe along with the OppAlerts intent data service.

”More platform perks, datasets, and integrations are in development for release in 2016, including: a new, responsive platform design; a new product development dataset; an updated Google Chrome Extension; and an updated, ‘Lightening Ready’ Salesforce Native App.”

Their “new and improved platform” is currently in final stage beta rollout. The enhanced platform “offers a complete redesign of the user interface and numerous ‘under the hood’ speed and functionality enhancements.”

Chrome Extension Update

The Google Chrome extension enhancements, which were released just as the year closed, provide context based intelligence from all of their datasets including IT, marketing, and finance.  The Chrome extension will support additional databases in 2016.

The Chrome extension works as a side panel that automatically displays company intelligence, including contacts and company overviews, based upon the current website.  The system stores account credentials so that company overviews are immediately displayed.  From the browser, a user can quickly select a contact or company name and look it up within the Chrome extension.  Thus, the service is bi-directional with users switching between the extension and browser without additional logins and without having to reenter information to conduct company searches.

DiscoverOrg provided the following Chrome Connector data workflow scenario on their blog:

Assume you’re an information security vendor and you are researching Fannie Mae, the Chrome Extension will return the CISO’s full group and contacts to you right in the browser – no need to login to DiscoverOrg and run another search. From there you can easily add contacts to your CRM tool, research the company further in DiscoverOrg, or lookup a similar company or contact.

Because DiscoverOrg also supports CRM platforms including SFDC,  MS Dynamics, NetSuite, Talent Rover, and SugarCRM, users can begin with a company, contact name, or URL for research then upload the company or contact information to their CRM from DiscoverOrg.  Company and contact data is not mined from the web but collected by its team of researchers, ensuring higher quality information.

Other Chrome Extension features include executive lists with filtering; executive headshots with responsibilities, contact information and social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) links; technology details; similar companies; and sales triggers.

The Chrome extension is free to current subscribers.

Chrome Extensions

While Google Chrome has only garnered limited support from sales intelligence vendors, it has seen significant development from vendors providing technology overviews.  Along with DiscoverOrg, there are Google Chrome extensions from HG Data, Datanyze, BuiltWith, SimilarTech, W3Techs, and HIveMind.  Most of these services are limited to an analysis of online technology associated with the corporate website, but DiscoverOrg utilizes researchers and HG Data employs semantic mining of news and websites to obtain behind the firewall platforms and vendors.

DiscoverOrg: Continued Growth in the Tech Sales Intelligence Space

DO for SFDCIt has been a busy year for technology sales intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg.  Along with acquiring iProfile and processing their technology profiles through editorial review, they have launched European and Finance department datasets.  Earlier this year, they announced plans to double their staff to 250 employees by the end of 2015.  Editorial growth increased their capacity, permitting them to build out multiple databases simultaneously.

The staff investments combined with their iProfile acquisition allowed them to double their editorially gathered coverage to 50,000 companies and 700,000 decision makers.  Most of this coverage growth has been outside of the United States.  They also built out datasets covering finance and marketing executives realizing that cloud software purchasing decisions have been shifting away from the CIO to other C-level executives, particularly the CMO.

Additional product and content announcements are coming soon.

While most vendors have gone to automated processes to collect significant percentages of their content, DiscoverOrg is proudly old school in its editorial policies employing traditional data collection methods tied to ninety day review cycles. This process limits the number of companies they can cover (currently around 50,000 organizations with 400 or more employees), but ensures high degrees of data accuracy, fill rates, and currency. Along with company profiles, the firm collects IT contacts, platforms, organization charts, and plans.

DiscoverOrg has gained significant market traction and is now in the pole position amongst the technology focused sales intelligence vendors. DiscoverOrg is a five time Inc. 5000 list winner, an indication of its success in selling services to sales and marketing departments at technology firms (they also target IT staffing).

“Our trusted solution and our team’s commitment to revolutionizing how today’s B2B sales teams prospect are the key factors in our success,” said CEO Henry Schuck. “We’re excited to celebrate our achievements, but we’re always focused on finding new ways to keep growing and providing additional value for our clients.”

Freed from Harte-Hanks, the AccessCI Database May Become Relevant Again

Aberdeen Group CI Technology Database Infographic (Sept 2015)
Aberdeen Group CI Technology Database Infographic (Sept 2015)

Aberdeen Group, which was divested from Harte-Hanks earlier this year, announced a set of enhancements to the CI Technology Data Set (FKA Harte-Hanks Market Intelligence).  Upgrades include broader project and platform information, a trebling of contacts, expanded CI Pipeline alerts, and 300 tech focused “technology interest classifiers.”  The company claims to cover 90% of the global IT spend across 3 million global locations.

Aberdeen Group uses both human and machine verified processes to identify over $2 billion in technology focused IT Spend.  Purchase Plans are tracked at both the company and contact level.

The company added 5,000 new technologies to their tracking bringing the total to 8,878 installed technologies.  According to their press release, “combined with the insight surrounding captured IT spend, Aberdeen Group is now uniquely positioned to be the most accurate source of technology install and spend data in the world.”

Aberdeen has grown their contact coverage to ten million names across “every IT buying center important to technology sales, marketing, and business intelligence professionals.”  Contacts are combined in Elite Profiles along with IT Platform data and 520 additional variables.

Their CI Pipeline purchase monitoring solution delivers 3,000 net new in-market per month across 35 tech categories.

Aberdeen added a new set of 300 digital interest classifiers allowing users to research companies based upon both their digital and online profiles.

“Companies in the technology industry come to Aberdeen Group when they need a definitive answer about companies and contacts buying technology,” said Aberdeen Group CEO Gary Skidmore. “Our vast and growing technology data assets coupled with our unique data science and technology focused content offer technology executives with insight and assets they can’t find in any other industry source. Our goal is to make it easy for the technology industry to know where to go when they require answers and action surrounding the technology buyer.”

Aberdeen Group did not name their partners, but the intent file sounds like Bombora’s.  HG Data lists Aberdeen Group as a partner on their site.

Over the past year, Harte-Hanks has also signed deals with Dun & Bradstreet and Data.com to deliver their file over D&B and Data.com’s Data Exchanges.

Under Harte-Hanks, the CI Technology database fell from market leadership due to limited investment and marketing.  DiscoverOrg and RainKing attacked the market with higher quality, top company databases tied into CRM and Marketing Automation platforms while the HHMI solution remained fairly static.  Fifteen years ago they would have led any technology intelligence list, but they would now struggle to make many vendor shortlists.  These enhancements suggest that the new owners are investing in the database and looking to take DiscoverOrg and RainKing.