I have been posting my articles as LinkedIn posts for the past few months, but I wanted to link some of the recent articles. The biggest recent announcement was Informa’s bid to merge its Informa Tech division with TechTarget. I also covered their new IntentMail GenAI capability.
Informa Tech CEO Gary Nugent said, “This combination brings a new revenue scale, resilient revenue growth, and increased revenue stability.”
TechTarget Merges with Informa Tech
Informa PLC, a FTSE 50 UK Group company, announced a definitive agreement to combine Informa Tech’s digital business with TechTarget. The combined business will “create a leading global platform in B2B Data and Market Access, focused on helping vendors in enterprise technology and other markets accelerate revenue growth.”
The “New TechTarget” will be positioned as a “unique end-to-end solution provider across the go-to-market: from strategy, messaging and content development to in-market activation via brand, demand generation, purchase intent data and sales enablement,” declared the firms. “The combination brings scale benefits, diversified revenue streams, and strategic expansion opportunities by expanding TechTarget’s current addressable market and enhancing the resilience of its business by increasing its presence in new markets and new buyer personas.”
Informa is contributing its Informa Tech digital business and $350 million in cash in exchange for 57% of the combined company. The cash is to be paid to existing shareholders when the deal closes. TechTarget’s shareholders will retain a 43% equity stake in the combined company…
IntentMail employs GenAI to draft Priority Engine Emails framed by Prospect-level intent.
TechTarget unveiled IntentMail AI, a beta GenAI feature that drafts Priority Engine emails. TechTarget emphasizes its intent data as it is tied to opted-in readers of its 150 B2B Technology websites. Thus, IntentMail AI offers opted-in prospect-level intent that supports precision messaging around top-of-mind topics when buyers are in-market.
“Unlike other offerings recently reaching the market, only IntentMail AI combines recent, relevant account information together with deep insights on what the specific targeted recipient has been actually researching on TechTarget’s global publishing network,” explained TechTarget. “As such, IntentMail AI will not only help drastically reduce the time it takes for sales teams to more effectively personalize outbound outreach, it stands to dramatically increase conversion.”
IntentMail AI is part of TechTarget’s “personalized assist AI-driven product strategy.” CEO Mike Cotoia believes that opted-in prospect-level intent will differentiate its GenAI offerings from competitors across three dimensions: relevancy, efficiency, and precision focus…
B2B content syndication vendor NetLine launched INTENTIVE, their buyer-level intent platform at last week’s Forrester event in Austin. INTENTIVE offers “real-time insights into truly ‘who’ is actively expressing intent within a B2B account.”
INTENTIVE is similar to TechTarget’s Priority Engine but broader in focus. Whereas Priority Engine’s intent data is focused on enterprise and health tech, INTENTIVE supports a wider range of 247 industries, including pharma, aviation, manufacturing, and enterprise technology, etc.
“By design, TechTarget is highly focused on supporting the needs of B2B marketers and is targeting technology decision makers. They expanded to healthcare, but that’s about it,” noted Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting. “We view our platform as persona-agnostic and diversified” due to the broader scope and depth and breadth of NetLine’s audiences which now also includes Informa media properties and events.
Fortino described TechTarget Priority Engine as a “phenomenal product” but geared toward a more select audience of technology buyers. As such, Priority Engine is “Apple-esque,” while INTENTIVE is the “Android alternative in the marketplace.”
NetLine’s intent data is all “first-party-sourced data” and not cookie-based. Furthermore, it is transparent and includes professional bios, job types, job levels, locations, and engagement activity.
By surfacing individual activity data, NetLine is going beyond “black box metrics.”
INTENTIVE provides buyer-level activity data within accounts. Both online (e.g., webinars attended) and offline (e.g., conference sessions attended) activities are displayed with weights applied based on activity type.
Fortino also emphasized that INTENTIVE is both persona and industry-diversified, so not limited to IT Buyers.
INTENTIVE’s buyer-level intent activity spans 11,000 topics. Intent data is captured from millions of first-party content registrations, 285 distinct event activity types, and 329,000 keywords.
“With nearly 15k+ pieces of content on the platform, a given customer’s assets usually account for 0.03% of all content. For years, our clients gladly worked with us to source first-party leads that specifically engaged with their own content,” blogged NetLine Content Marketing Manager Jonathan Steiert. “The reality, however, is that 99% of their ICP were engaging with content on our platform—they just weren’t engaging with their content. They were missing nearly all of their buyer’s journey.”
NetLine was acquired by Informa in late 2021, so it benefits from Informa’s content and event registration data across 100 million event activities. Event Intent is gathered from over 500 annual B2B events hosted by Informa.
“We were acquired not because of what we were doing at the time but based on the vision of filling out a buyer-level intent platform on top of all of the various content consumption signals that we’re processing every single day of the year,” explained Fortino. “By being part of Informa, we were able to aggregate not only all of the content consumption and buyer behaviors occurring through all of the NetLine powered content experiences, but also all of the Informa properties and all of the Informa offline events.”
When Informa met with NetLine before acquiring it, “Informa was sitting on a massive amount of event-specific intent data that was looking for a mechanism and impetus to action that data into a subscription-oriented product.”
Fortino sees two high-level categories of intent vendors (he omits second-party review sites): Vendors such as Bombora that provide third-party intent based on page views and firms with a broad set of B2B content that drive buyer-level intent. Firms such as TechTarget and Foundry provide “some transparency into what individuals are doing on the sites that they own and operate.” The transparency gives users “a bit more granularity into downloading a white paper, webinar, and so on.”
Fortino argues that NetLine’s advantage is the scope of activity generated across Informa, NetLine, Industry Dive (34 B2B publications and newsletters), and events. Activities go beyond page views.
“There’s everything from…submitting a demo request to expressing an interest in learning more about a given topic, to taking a course and being certified, to the most extreme: going to an event and sitting in countless sessions and being scanned each time you’re going into one of those sessions. All of these 285 things are visualized inside the product as well. So, you can know that this person downloaded a toolkit that helps them predictably model X or they’ve registered for this event.”
Thus, NetLine is marrying online, offline, and customer-content-based intent data.
The signal intensity of some activities is much greater than that of others. “While pageviews can be brief, attending a conference is a very robust form of intent…Compare that to a group of people, let’s say it’s a CEO, a CTO, a director of DevOps, are flying to Vegas for four days to attend the Black Hat conference,” argued Fortino. “They’re sitting in six and a half hours of material each day for three days about malware [and] other enterprise security topics.” The difference in signal intensity is “night and day,” continued Fortino. “Those three people spent maybe 30 grand for three days going to that event.”
Furthermore, “We are looking at the seniority of the person taking those activities. We’re looking at the types of activities that they are actually doing,” including how those activities map to buyer journey stages.
Conversely, if the user is anonymous, “we’re actually disinterested in scoring that information and playing up the value of that information,” argued Fortino. Pageview-based intent is interesting but not actionable for sales reps. “If you’re telling me someone at SAP is trending for these three topics, I don’t even know where to begin.”
INTENTIVE’s real-time dashboard consolidates activity at both the buyer and account-level. Additional insights include buyer trends and confirmed projects, “a buyer-first view of professionals who have confirmed they have an active pain point, identified challenges, and shared their timeline to invest.”
Daily Buyer-Level Intent email alert
Other features include customizable email notifications, a native Salesforce app, and real-time buyer and account scores.
“Prior to today, there has been significant buzz about intent,” argued NetLine CEO Robert Alvin. “But the majority of existing intent-based products relied solely upon company IP recognition and webpage visits which doesn’t tell you “Who” is intending to do what. With INTENTIVE, NetLine has changed the meaning and raised the bar when it comes to intent. Marketers now have access to deeper buyer-level insights allowing them to accelerate the sales process from their marketing endeavors.”
Furthermore, Alvin noted that buyer-level insights eliminate hours of guesswork and accelerate prospecting, messaging, and understanding a prospect’s timeline.
Most intent solutions deliver account-level intent but lack buyer-level insights. They identify accounts (or accounts and locations), but do not usually indicate the individual behind the activity. Furthermore, other intent solutions capture their intent from one primary touch point – Pageviews.
“The basis for 99.9% of all intent data on the market comes directly from pageviews. Sans INTENTIVE, these solutions curate these data sets based upon this behavior, which lasts seconds, if not milliseconds, long,” expounded Steiert. “These pageviews are then referenced against historical baselines at the IP address and company domain. Effectively, every single existing intent vendor (thanks in large part to Bombora’s mostly commodified status sets) offers the same level of insights as their competitors.”
INTENTIVE provides a wider array of business intent at the buyer-level.
However, NetLine offers a broader array of buying activity that includes analyst reports, demo requests, disclosed areas of interest, event attendance, and confirmed projects.
“The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, said Heinz Marketing President Matt Heinz. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
The baseline INTENTIVE license includes three explorers, corresponding to three targeted intent categories with up to 25 topics per explorer. Explorers can have multiple audiences for segmentation (e.g., size, industry, geography) and email notification.
Keywords are tied to topics, but free-form keyword selects won’t be available until the V2 release.
Account and buyer Intent Trendlines and activity are available as soon as an explorer is defined.
The Explorer Dashboard displays buyer and account trendlines, accounts with buyer activity, and buyer-confirmed projects. The dashboard is displayed immediately after defining an explorer and uniquely loads historical intent data for immediate review and actioning.
Fortino noted that other intent platforms typically take 45-60 days to curate data for optimal use.
Confirmed Projects were initially sold as NetLine Intent Discovery, but that product was transitioned to a core feature within INTENTIVE.
NetLine collects first-party project data as readers register for and consume content. NetLine “intercepts those users, asks them a very short survey about their pain points, their urgency to address those pain points, challenges that they have, and most importantly, the timeline to invest in correcting those things.”
Account Activity details include confirmed projects, activity type, engaged buyers, and trending topics.
The Account Activity dashboard is filterable by function, level, and firmographics. Users may drill down to any account to see who is displaying intent and the nature of their activity. Saved filters can be set as daily email alerts.
Users can drill down from Accounts to Buyers or the reverse.
While buyer-level intelligence is provided, NetLine does not display PII beyond customer content interactions. Fortino noted that sales teams already have other vendors for contact data (e.g., ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, Clearbit), but they are not providing buyer-level intent.
“This just comes back to permission data use. I know a lot of vendors love to throw in this idea of recommended contacts where they’re really just using ZoomInfo data,” explained Fortino. “We may do that, but honestly, it’s a bit disinteresting again because it’s just commoditized data sets that everyone has access to.”
Fortino’s near-term focus is building connectors with other platforms. At launch, Salesforce is natively supported, but others will soon follow.
There is currently a waitlist for INTENTIVE access. NetLine is offering a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is similar to existing account-level intent providers but obviously delivers buyer-level insights. The license includes three explorers, unlimited seats, and the Salesforce app.
Fortino argued that the unlimited seats are a “strong differentiator when you’re evaluating existing solutions,” particularly at enterprise accounts with many users.
“Zoom IQ for Sales analyzes customer interactions to surface key insights, actions, and content from sales meetings. Sales leaders can also use this data to help make better-informed management decisions regarding their sales teams,” blogged UCaaS Product Marketing Manager Theresa Larkin. “With actionable insights based on proven sales strategies and a wealth of data, organizations can streamline the new sales rep onboarding process, create a modern sales methodology, and further develop their sales teams.”
Zoom IQ for Sales conversational analytics
Zoom describes Zoom IQ for Sales as its “First Step in Conversational Intelligence.” The service is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange. Insights include
Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
Longest Spiel – Identifies the longest monologue to help reps hone their pitches and avoid monologues.
Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.
Talk-Listen Ratios – Analyzes whether there is a balance between lead speaker talk time and time granted to others.
Competitor and Feature Mentions – Tags competitors and product features so reps, competitive analysts, and product teams can drill into prospect concerns, competitive statements, and potential gaps in the product.
Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision. General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.
Zoom IQ supports a video snippets library of best practices exemplars. Snippets can be used for initial training or for reviewing how to handle specific objections, present the value of various products, or position across target verticals.
Zoom Sales IQ Playlists
“Zoom has made strategic investments in homegrown speech recognition technologies and recruited a world-class team to produce high-fidelity transcription services that are a backbone for products like Zoom IQ…We’re developing domain-specific NLU (natural language understanding) using few-shot models to build features that will be more reliable and valuable to our users,” said Josh Dulberger, Zoom’s head of product, data, and AI. “Sales teams…want to focus on the customer, and managing the engagement rather than taking notes, but also so they can review their calls to pick up nuances, easily identify next steps, or solicit some guidance from a colleague. Managers and sales leaders can’t sit in on every call but want to understand the selling climate, when to coach, and which reps are finding the right message.”
Zoom IQ for Sales places Zoom in competition with many of its partners, including Salesloft, Outreach, Chorus, and Gong.
TechCrunch Senior Report Kyle Wiggers cautioned buyers about Zoom’s AI capabilities: “The jury’s out on the accuracy of Zoom’s algorithms, particularly given the company’s history of deploying flawed AI. Sentiment analysis algorithms are especially prone to gender and race bias, and not every salesperson will necessarily agree with how Zoom measures engagement.”
“Zoom is almost certainly feeling the pressure from investors to establish new lines of revenue,” continued Wiggers. “While the company’s earnings soared during the pandemic, guidance is down as customers begin to shift to hybrid and in-office work arrangements less reliant on videoconferencing.”
Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.
“Half a million businesses choose Zoom and rely on it for internal and external conversations,” said Dulberger. “The Zoom platform already has a strong foundation in this area with features such as transcription, recordings, and highlights. This also gives us an opportunity to expand this type of functionality across the Zoom platform such as Zoom Contact Center and within our meetings and events solutions to help presenters pace their speech, take notes, capture action items or employ specific tactics.”
Zoom Events, Zoom’s platform for virtual and hybrid shows, is adding a backstage feature that lets panelists, speakers, and production crews meet before, during, and after events. During the session, support staff can view the webinar feed, chat with each other, answer attendees’ questions, and practice their presentations. Zoom Events Backstage should be available by the end of April.
Other new Events features include branded wallpaper that displays behind tiles and webinar reactions.
Informa also announced that it has taken a stake in UK event tech company Totem, an existing partner of its Informa Connect division. In April, the firms launched ConnectMe, a bespoke licensing of Totem’s platform to support Informa’s virtual and hybrid events.
“With the launch of ConnectMe with Totem, Informa is preparing itself for the next stage in the events experience, one in which we can seamlessly curate and blend the physical and virtual, ensuring the two are complementary, not competitive.
ConnectMe will ensure that we can cater for varying levels of audience readiness to re-enter physical spaces by ensuring that neither physical nor virtual audiences feel they are excluded from a truly optimal experience. In 2021 and beyond, that is the service we aim to achieve, and ConnectMe will help us to do it.”
Informa Connect CMO Isobel Peck in April
Informa Connect hosts in-person and virtual events and training, online communities, digital content, and marketing services for the Finance, Biotech/Pharma, and other specialist markets.
“Totem has been an important partner over the last 18 months, and we’re pleased to be deepening this relationship,” said Informa Connect CEO Andrew Mullins. “We want to keep enhancing our in-person events, adding smart features, technologies, and apps that give our customers an even better experience. With Totem, we have a partner that is equally committed to outstanding experiences and bringing new innovation to events.”
Wrapping digital intelligence around trade shows is a logical extension of the digitization of sales and marketing. Live events came to a halt in 2020 and are still reeling, but in 2022 we should begin to see them re-emerge. Events should be hybrid, with digital content sharing from the event floor to virtual attendees.
Event attendees also should improve data capture. Loading a trade show scanned file from the exhibition floor has always been subject to delays, with reps following up a week later (if at all) to determine whether there was interest. Calendaring service Chili Piper recently announced Chili Events for setting up trade show meetings prior to an event and follow-up meetings with reps directly from the floor. It is a matter of striking while the iron is hot.
Informa did not disclose the pricing for either deal or the extent of its investment in Totem.
The name of the game in Revenue Acceleration is Digital Engagement. There are many forms of engagement that are now being captured (emails, chat, meetings, webinars, etc.), but offline events seemed to be beyond the scope of capture; however, Chili Piper, the calendaring company, has designed tools for scheduling meetings at trade shows and from trade show floors.
The new Chili Events service offers an “all-in-one Event Meetings Management solution for generating more meetings and maximizing ROI from in-person conferences and trade shows.” In short, Chili is looking to facilitate meetings and gather engagement data from in-person events.
As in-person events return, it is vital to gather registration data as event attendees are likely to be part of the demand unit. According to Chili Piper, “81% of conference and trade show attendees have buying authority.”
“In-person events are hugely important for B2B revenue teams,” said Chili Piper CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe. “With Chili Events, we’re making it possible for marketing and sales to not just automate booking conference and trade show meetings with key prospects and customers, but to treat those meetings like any other digital touchpoint in the customer journey, with quantifiable results and data.”
Chili Event Reminders support a rescheduling link.
Chili Events features include URLs to pre-book meetings, meeting space availability, unified meeting calendars, automated reminders and rescheduling via email and SMS, and an event management dashboard. Chili Events are integrated with GSuite and Outlook365. Additionally, check-ins and no-shows are synced to Salesforce Campaigns.
Chili Events also supports meeting scheduling from trade booth floors via QR codes for mobile phones, computers at the booth, or register on the prospect’s behalf via Chili’s Instant Booker Scheduler.
Engagement intelligence supports multiple revenue acceleration features including engagement scoring, deal health signals, and deal risk alerts. It can also be used to identify and upload missing contacts in the CRM and build out the buying committee.
Keeping on the gifting theme, Boston-based Alyce announced a partnership with Salesloft to support “smart gifting” on the Salesloft Sales Engagement Platform. The partnership lets sales and marketing teams natively send gifts through Salesloft.
Alyce appears within the Salesloft People page side panel, where reps can select a gift and personalize the message. Gifting options include physical gifts, gift cards, subscriptions, branded swag, on-demand services (e.g., in-home massage, portrait session), experiences (e.g., walking tours, helicopter rides), and donations. Alyce’s AI suggests three gift choices, but reps can select other choices from the marketplace.
“Actionable insights, seamlessly integrated together can help your sales team say the right thing, to the right person, at the right time with the right gift to drive action that’ll ensure your team hits your targets month after month,” wrote Alyce.
A gifting history provides details on which gifts have been received and how the prospect engaged with the gift, helping revenue teams “optimize follow-up to drive greater impact.”
Alyce employs AI to assist with gift selection from its curated global marketplace. Alyce recipients are sent a physical or digital notification of a gift, which they can choose to accept, exchange, donate, or decline.
“Our partnership with Salesloft is such a natural match. We are both committed to enabling revenue teams to build strong relationships and improve business results with the help of smart technology. At Alyce, we are thrilled that our integration with Salesloft is giving marketing and sales teams new gifting superpowers right in their workflow that will allow them to deliver meaningful moments, increase revenue, and create greater impact.”
Alyce CEO Greg Segall
In a case study, Salesloft enjoyed a 50% increase in alignment between BDRs and strategic marketing with Alyce and drove a 9% increase in meeting attendance. Furthermore, twenty percent of gifts sent resulted in new opportunities.
“Through the platform, we have uncovered an increase in the sales team’s ability to sell to our target personas,” stated Nabiha Balala, Senior Manager of Enterprise Marketing at Salesloft. “Alyce has been such a game-changer. It’s organically become part of our everyday sales process.”
Alyce’s physical gifting is currently limited to the US and Canada. However, gift cards may be sent to the US, Canada, Britain, and Ireland.
Alyce raised a $30 million Series B in April.
I’ve been running a series on Offline Marketing Automation (E-Gifting and Event Marketing) this week: My other posts:
The Postal market supports 600 vendors, providing them with a corporate sales channel without spending on corporate channel marketing. Their vendor network is growing organically through word of mouth. Last month they added 149 vendors.
“Vendors can add their products to the Postal Marketplace and get direct access to B2B buyers as their preferred corporate sending partner,“ Product Marketing Director Allyssa Eclarin explained to GZ Consulting. Items can be purchased off-the-shelf or customized. For example, companies can send cookies with corporate logos or baby gifts with the child’s name or curated boxes for special occasions.
“People don’t necessarily want another Starbucks gift card. They want to hear that you heard them, that you value them, and that you understand their interests. Maybe you send them a mug of their favorite sports team or where they went to college, or a new baby bundle. Personalization matters. And that’s what we’re finding is people are getting more personalized than ever. People are automating this channel, and it’s working.”
Postal Director Product Marketing Director Allyssa Eclarin
Furthermore, now that we are entering people’s homes via Zoom, there is a greater level of intimacy for personalizing gifts.
Postal also supports automated direct mail, incentive marketing, brand advocacy, internal and external events, and branded company swag. CRM and MAP partner platforms include Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, and Eloqua.
For Salesloft and Outreach, Postal may be added as a sequence/cadence step, streamlining the gifting process. Gifts may be sent via email, social, direct message, or direct mail, with Postal tracking gifts and supporting analytics such as the cost per touch. Postal also offers a “Magic Link,” a unique URL that can be inserted into an email or social channel. For example, reps can send gifts through a DM and avoid the “what’s your email?” discussion with a magic link. The link is then tracked for shipping, attribution, budgeting, and analytics. Magic links can also be used for “send on behalf of” situations (e.g., an SDR building a relationship for the AE).
Postal.io is positioning itself alongside market leaders in managing customer and prospect touchpoints.
With face-to-face meetings stopped during the pandemic, e-gifting and personalized gifts are among the few methods for building goodwill and generating positive memories. Offline marketing platforms such as Postal, Sendoso, PFL, and Alyce have seen robust growth over the past eighteen months as sales reps struggle to build relationships.
Traditional gifting has been cumbersome and difficult to track, but offline marketing platforms streamline gift selection, logistics, and tracking, letting reps know when a gift has been received. Gifting serves multiple purposes: establishing a relationship, rewarding webinar attendance, keeping in touch with a champion during an absence (e.g., health, maternity / paternity leave), or maintaining goodwill (e.g., holiday gifts, birthday gifts).
“As marketing becomes increasingly technical and formulaic, businesses are struggling to create moments that break through the noise. The adoption of digital marketing has ironically made it harder than ever to truly connect with consumers. Postal is among the first to personalize marketing automation by creating a bridge between a boutique front-end marketplace and the established systems already embedded in most marketing technology stacks. The friction between offline and online marketing disappears, making it simple for brands to build more meaningful connections with consumers in any industry.”
Eugene Lee, OMERS Ventures (Postal.io investor)
Along with the funding round, Postal announced a set of product enhancements:
Domestic and international warehousing for branded products.
International gifting across seventy countries with wallets and pricing in local currencies.
Postal Events, launched in February, supports hybrid teams. Postal Event enhancements include custom event images on event pages, customized event email templates and messaging, custom form fields on registration pages, and integration of Postal Events with Salesforce Campaigns.
Calendar booking on gift landing pages
Postal.io posted 10X ARR growth year-over-year and added over 250 new customers and 4,000 users. The firm is based in San Luis Obispo.
Postal and its competitors disagree on their category name, with terms such as Tactile Marketing, Sending Platform, and Personal Experience Platform. Postal uses the category name Offline Marketing Automation. The G2 review site has the firms categorized as Account-Based Direct Mail Software.
Postal customers “get it.” They say, “you’re going to automate this channel that I know works. I’m already spending the money, but I have no way to attribute it, track it, push it back, check the ROI, or anything like that without a platform. Now, with Postal, they can, and customers are resonating with the term ‘offline marketing automation’,” explained Eclarin. “We’re seeing the same thing happening to our category as we saw with email marketing automation boom, with the rise of MailChimp and the like. We have given teams an automated, scalable, and repeatable way to manage their offline channels. “
A Postal license runs across the company with no per-seat pricing. Instead, admins set up individual and departmental budgets. Thus, the HR department can leverage Postal to build camaraderie (e.g., events), welcome new employees with swag packages, and express congratulations (e.g., baby, company anniversary). Likewise, managers can send gifts to reward performance.
Building camaraderie during WFH has become increasingly important for Postal. When events launched, roughly 70% were for marketing and 30% for team building. However, as Zoom fatigue settled in and the pandemic slowed the return to offices, companies began looking for fun team-building exercises that avoid Zoom burnout. Thus, corporate event volume has moved closer to parity with marketing events.
Postal promoted a Second City roast to demonstrate the value of digital event marketing hosted on their platform.
This is the third in a series of articles on Offline Marketing Automation (i.e. e-gifting and digital event marketing).
A Second City Improv show is one of the most popular Events on Postal.
Offline Marketing Automation Platform Postal.io closed on a $22 million Series B led by OMERS Ventures, with current investor Mayfield Fund also joining the round. The series raised total funding to $31 million.
The funds will be directed toward growing the Postal.io team, ongoing product development, and international expansion. The firm is looking to address the lack of tracking, attribution, automation, and scale in the $120 billion market for direct mail, personalized incentives, branded swag, and corporate gifting.
Postal offers an “expansive marketplace featuring high-end, locally curated items from specialized vendors” that foster “meaningful experiences to drive better engagement with prospects, increase conversion rates, and boost employee engagement.”
“Teams that were once manually sending offline touchpoints are now able to efficiently automate and track direct mail, branded company swag, personalized gifts, and virtual events at scale. We help companies leverage this proven channel with a frictionless, team-agnostic platform. Companies are using Postal.io across their organization to deliver more meaningful, impactful, and delightful experiences.”
Postal.io CEO Erik Kostelnik
Events began as mostly marketing activities, but with so many employees working from home, roughly half of their events are employee team-building activities or celebrations. Postal claims an average attendance rate of 90% for its events.
Postal offers a concierge team that operates as an “extension of your marketing team.” Postal Concierge assists with managing “curated, branded, specialty items, and experiences that are guaranteed to surprise and delight your prospects and clients.” The Concierge team also assists with event customization and talent booking.
A Postal collection that provides a set of coffee or tea options. The collection is being displayed with the rep’s name via a Magic Link.
Another feature is collections. Instead of picking a single item, the rep sends a link to an array of themed items, allowing the user to choose from the collection. Thus, a drink collection would include coffee, tea, and cocoa options. Likewise, a cocktail-making event would offer a mocktail option.
Part II continues with a discussion of the Postal Marketplace and integrations.
CEO Kyle Porter launched SalesLoft nearly ten years ago and the SEP Cadence product (its flagship) in late 2014. To recharge and reflect, he took a sabbatical earlier this summer to his family’s tangerine grove.
“One of my biggest conclusions was that I’m given this thing another ten years. So I’m committed to running this business and outlasting and out-executing and out-innovating others in the market.
Another one of those conclusions was [that] we don’t really compare ourselves to the competition. We focus entirely on our customers’ needs, and delivering them the best digital sales combination and workspaces that ever existed…I see all of these companies as different than SalesLoft. We’re very unique. We’re unique in the way that we show care for our customers and each other. We’re unique in the way we innovate and bring new ideas to market and trailblaze the path for digital sales. We’re unique in how we combine these multiple different new, impactful digital solutions into one workspace for our customers.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter (GZ Consulting Interview 8/20/21)
Porter is “exploring multiple options” to remain an independent business and continue growing SalesLoft’s market presence. Doing so entails getting “better and better over time at serving our customers [and] at innovating in the marketplace.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
The firm is also preparing for a future IPO. “We’re going down the road to build a public business prior to being a public business,” commented Porter. “And so we’re putting that governance in place [and] those financial controls in place. You see the independent board member being added. We’ve got an opportunity to continue that with an audit committee chair and another independent board member.”
“I’d love this to be a public business,” continued Porter. “And if that’s what’s right for the company, that’s what will happen.”
Porter is also proud of his ownership structure, saying that SalesLoft has the “cleanest cap table” and fewest investors amongst companies in the space that have reached scale. The presence of Jason Green of Emergence Capital and Jeff Horing of Insight Capital also gives him confidence. Porter views them as “invest and hold” partners. Both serve on SalesLoft’s Board.
Porter has a great deal of respect for ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck, whom he met at Dreamforce in 2013. “It’s amazing to see what they’ve done. He’s an inspiration and role model for us, definitely a different business with data at the core. We no longer do data. And they’ve moved into the application space. But this is a giant market, and [in] some of the areas they play, we’ve got more experience and capabilities and history and lessons learned and edge case analysis that we’ve been through. And in some of the areas, primarily the data side, he’s got more experience and capabilities. So, we’re excited to see what they’re doing. I love reading his quarterly reports and learning what’s on his mind. He and I stay in touch regularly. It’s a joy to be in the category with people you love and respect.”
Porter would like to return to live conferences but expects to initially host “smaller, more intimate settings” such as a fifty-person CRM summit or a sales operations leader event. Later on, Porter looks forward to hosting large events again, such as their 2,000-person Atlanta Rainmaker conference held in 2019.
Last month’s InStereo acquisition is going “incredibly well.” The acquisition of one of its service partners brought SalesLoft “capabilities to serve our most critical enterprise customers.” The purchase was prompted by feedback from their joint customers who told Porter “how amazing” the InStereo team was in delivering “critical experiences to help them push the boundaries of modern revenue.”
Furthermore, “there were just such good relationships” between the companies that it allowed everybody to “hit the ground running once the transaction closed. SalesLoft employment has grown 50% since the beginning of the pandemic and now stands at 615 headcount.
Technology purchase intent data vendor TechTarget added another arrow to its intent quiver with the acquisition of BrightTALK, a leader in the marketing and virtual events space. BrightTALK said virtual event attendance has “high predictive value because IT buyers are making a material investment of their time to engage with vendor-produced content.”
The acquisition increases TechTarget’s universe of opted-in professionals. TechTarget already has over twenty million opted-in business contact records (mostly in technology positions from its 140 enterprise technology sites), and BrightTALK has eight million registered attendees on its media platform. There is likely to be some overlap in names, but having a second source of opted-in professionals increases the scope of measured intent across TechTarget, BrightTALK, and corporate websites (a KickFire OEM deal).
The acquisition offers substantial cross-selling opportunities in 2021 as vendors continue to focus on virtual events in lieu of face-to-face trade shows and conferences. Furthermore, “BrightTALK generates a large volume of valuable content in webinar and video format that is incremental to TechTarget’s current offerings. This content improves TechTarget’s potential ability to attract new users and diversifies the content available via TechTarget’s portfolio of web sites.”
And because both platforms are opted-in, the intent data does not need to be anonymized. TechTarget can deliver person-level intent data that includes contact information, articles read, webinar sessions viewed, potential competitors, and their stage in the buyer’s journey. What’s more, these rich intent datasets are GDPR-compliant across both platforms.
“TechTarget’s leadership position in the market is further strengthened by the acquisition of BrightTALK. This acquisition checks all the boxes. It allows us to increase our original content, grow our opt-in audience of registered members, and add a material amount of proprietary first-party purchase intent data. It’s a very powerful combination that will enhance our customers’ abilities to use our purchase intent data to grow their revenues and increase their market share.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
“We are excited to join forces with TechTarget. They are the leading provider of original expert content and distributor of vendor decision-support content in the B2B tech market, which has allowed them to develop the preeminent first-party purchase intent offering,” said BrightTALK CEO Paul Heald. “Combining our leading platform for online IT events is a winning combination.”
BrightTALK has over 1,000 customers who created 25,000 webinars and videos over the past year. The platform generates over 200,000 unique monthly viewers and six million annual content engagements.
BrightTALK also fits with TechTarget’s financial objectives. It is on track for $50 million in 2020 revenue, with approximately half this revenue under long-term contracts. TechTarget hit 35% in subscription revenue last quarter but has stated a 50% subscription revenue goal. With Priority Engine on track for approximately $50 million in 2020 subscription revenue and BrightTALK posting roughly $25 million, the combined pro forma company would generate $75 million in subscription revenues on $195 million in 2020 revenue (Q3 YTD + mid-point Q4 guidance + $50M BrightTALK estimate), or approximately 38 – 39% in contract-based revenue.
BrightTALK has also done well during the pandemic, with revenue on track to grow 30% this year. It added one million additional opted-in professionals over the past year.
The deal is priced at $150 million, a 3X multiple over projected 2020 earnings. The cash transaction will close before the end of the year.
BrightTALK has four offices in the US, two in the UK, and two in APAC (Sydney and Singapore). LinkedIn lists them with 275 employees, a headcount growth of 15% over the past year.
