Leadspace is promising at least a fifty-percent cut in third-party data licensing expenses for human-verified contacts, firmographics, and technographics. “This frees companies to reinvest their savings into advanced AI-assisted technologies to fully optimize funnel conversion,” stated Leadspace.
Leadspace aggregates third-party data from over thirty vendors, with data spanning 70 million companies, 240 million buying centers, and 280 million business professionals.
Leadspace delivers “fully-enriched, 360-degree buyer profiles of current and high-performance lookalike customers” that align the company’s territories with its TAM and ICP. It then activates ABM-derived audiences across multiple channels, including Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and LiveRamp.
Leadspace offers connectors for major platforms, including Salesforce, MSD, Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot.
“Leadspace is redefining the performance of B2B sales and marketing teams. We have over a decade of experience in delivering the most extensible B2B profiles in the industry. And unlike other offerings, the Leadspace platform is data source agnostic, open, and extensible,” stated Alex Yoder, CEO of Leadspace. “Companies large and small need and deserve complete and active profiles, but today many companies struggle to keep their profiles up to date and complete. We’ve worked with SalesIntel for several years, and this expansion in our partnership to include human-verified B2B contacts and technographic data in the Leadspace B2B graph is a testament to their being the leading vendor for the most affordable direct dial and accurate contact data in the industry.”
SalesIntel employs a global research network of nearly 2,000 editors who double-verify its data each quarter, ensuring a 95% accuracy level of its contacts. It also provides firmographics and technographics.
“At SalesIntel, we are committed to providing the best sales intelligence available for revenue teams of all sizes. Leadspace requires the highest quality data to fuel its platform, so this partnership expansion comes naturally. We are honored to be a trusted provider,” said SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “With customers having access to accurate contact data and over 200 million technographic data points, they will be equipped with the most accurate insights so they can expand reach, grow pipeline, and increase close rates.”
Growth equity firm Great Hill Partners invested €180 million in Echobot and Leadfeeder, merging the firms into a Sales Intelligence and Go-to-market platform. Both firms are based in Europe (Germany and Finland) and will benefit from the roadmap set out by North American RevTech firms.
The merged firm will be based in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg continuing as CEO. Leadfeeder CEO Pekka Koskinen will become the CPO. The combined company has a headcount of 250 across six offices in Europe and the US. The new firm’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeds €20 million.
Leadfeeder serves around 7,000 customers and Echobot 1,500.
Echobot’s European data coverage
Echobot offers a Sales Intelligence and B2B DaaS platform for the D-A-CH region, UK, and France. Late last year, it added a broader European data pack. It supports a database of 20 million European companies and over 60 million GDPR-compliant contacts. Company and contact data is derived from both registered filings and open web sources and includes directors, shareholders, and financials.
Echobot takes a “True Compliance” approach which gathers data only from publicly accessible sources. Furthermore, it provides verification links to the source URLs that allow reps to answer the question, “where did my data come from?” All data is hosted in Germany.
Echobot’s products include TARGET (prospecting), CONNECT (Sales Intelligence), DATACARE (B2B DaaS), and an API. In addition, Echobot offers CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM.
“It is our goal to be the leading sales intelligence and go-to-market platform to our core European and North American markets,” said Karweg. “Thanks to Great Hill, we have now assembled the best data, AI / ML, talent, and operating experience to achieve just that. We are increasingly seeing organizations looking to take advantage of their own data and third-party data, and then to augment this intelligence with better, more personalized outreach. The combination of Echobot and Leadfeeder is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a massive market opportunity at the early stages of adoption.”
Leadfeeder IP-to-Account Visitor Intelligence
Leadfeeder offers website visitor intelligence that maps IP addresses to company intelligence. During the pandemic, it worked to identify remote workers and map them to their employers, helping refine which companies are in-market. It also supports connectors for Google Analytics, chatbots, audience retargeting, major CRMs, Zapier, and Slack.
“Integrating Leadfeeder’s web visitor identification system with Echobot’s data and prospecting solutions creates a unique platform upon which we can both enable organizations to identify and engage high-intent prospects as well as introduce incremental applications that enhance B2B sales and marketing operations,” said Koskinen.
Karweg envisions an ABM workflow that begins with an ICP analysis that identifies net-new accounts. The ICP is then mapped against Leadfeeder’s visitor intelligence and Echobot’s firmographics and event triggers to identify high-value, in-market accounts for programmatic marketing. While programmatic campaigns are not yet supported, they are in development.
Great Hill Partners has also committed an additional €50 million toward future acquisitions. In an interview with GZ Consulting, Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg indicated that the €50M in dry powder would be used towards acquiring talent, RevTech functionality, or expanded content.
The equity acquisition is a combination of primary and secondary funding, with Great Hill Partners buying out many of the original investors. It named Growth Partner Derek Schoettle Chairman of the Board and placed Great Hill Partners Managing Director Chris Gaffney and Vice President Greg Stewart on the board of the merged organization.
Schoettle is also on the board of ABX Platform Terminus, another Great Hill investment. He was the CEO of ZoomInfo when DiscoverOrg acquired it in 2019 (DiscoverOrg subsequently assumed the name ZoomInfo), so he and the new board members offer deep Go-to-Market domain expertise.
“Go-to-market is one of the fastest-growing areas of B2B software. Sales and marketing organizations need timely, accurate information and intelligent systems to identify and engage their prospects in an increasingly personalized, automated fashion. By bringing together Echobot and Leadfeeder, we can create the next-generation sales intelligence and go-to-market platform,” stated Derek Schoettle.
The transaction is a merger of equals bringing together two firms of roughly the same revenue and employee base. Both firms have over €10M in ARR and are growing rapidly. Echobot grew 70% last year, while Leadfeeder had a 50% growth figure. Echobot has long been profitable, and Leadfeeder is nearing profitability.
The firms will initially run as independent brands as they merge their operations and platforms. The deal closed a few weeks ago but was announced this morning. Thus, they have already begun combining finance and HR. The two brands will be maintained in the near term with rebranding under consideration for 2023 as Echobot is also the name of a Mirai malware variant.
Valuation figures were not disclosed, but the final price was determined before the recent valuation declines and did not change. The firms were both being advised by GP Bullhound, which suggested that packaging the two firms together would result in a more effective growth equity round. Furthermore, the two companies offered features on each other’s roadmap so were logical complements.
Europe has been tracking behind the US in the Sales Intelligence space, with several national champions now looking to offer European datasets and local UIs. European sales intelligence and B2B DaaS solutions must meet higher data compliance and privacy standards, incorporate registered data from national registers, support multiple currencies, and many languages.
Echobot covers the D-A-CH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), the UK, and France, with a general European data package added late last year. A Nordic data package has been accelerated due to the merger, which would increase its competitiveness against Dun & Bradstreet and Vainu.
“One of the most requested developments for 2021 was to access data from the entire European market. That was not only requested from German customers with a strong export to European countries, but also from new, international users that want to expand into Europe,” explained Karweg last November when Echobot added coverage of over twenty European countries.
“Europe is not one country but many, and there are differences between them, whether it’s to do with culture or data compliance,” remarked Schoettle. “Having a platform that is unique and linguistic-specific, and serving its markets with high-quality data, is a differentiator.”
“It’s a dream match,” argued Koskinen. While previously the firm purchased contact data from multiple sources, “it has been difficult to get sufficiently up-to-date and accurate data.” With the merger, Leadfeeder will offer better data quality and “have all the expertise in-house” to expand its coverage.
Along with higher quality data, Leedfeeder will benefit from a broader set of firmographics, financials, and sales triggers for data enrichment and lead scoring. Leadfeeder will also be able to cross-sell Echobot’s sales intelligence, prospecting, and data enrichment services to its 7,000 customers.
“We want to be the biggest in Europe,” stated Koskinen. “It’s going to take a few years, but I think we’re succeeding…We have long had customers all over the world. After the merger, we will be able to offer something that no one else can.”
Echobot offers German and English-language Sales Triggers.
B2B data vendor RevenueBase closed a $6 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Additional investors include 2 Lanterns, Argon Ventures, Converge, Feldsmith Capital, Good Friends, Graph Ventures, Gutbrain Ventures, KOA Labs, PBJ Capital, and Service Provider Capital. The round was oversubscribed as RevenueBase enjoyed significant investor interest.
As part of the round, RevenueBase named three Directors to its Board:
Kent Bennett, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
Bob Davoli, Founder and Managing Director of GutBrain
Jude McColgan, former CEO of Localytics
RevenueBase launched last spring looking to solve issues in the B2B data market, including difficulty in identifying and engaging with Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) prospects and marketing’s reliance upon spammy demand generation instead of well-targeted messages. RevenueBase trebled its revenue over the past year and expects to do the same this year. It has already onboarded twenty customers, with a focus on selling data as a strategic asset to the CMO or CRO.
RevenueBase was founded by industry veterans Mark Feldman, the VP of Marketing at NetProspex before its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet, and Milenko Beslic, who built Cheapflights, the travel industry’s first metasearch engine. As a marketing head at Backupify, Motion Recruitment, and Localytics, Feldman became frustrated with B2B data issues, including misalignment with the sales and marketing team’s go-to-market strategy, data decay, difficulty acquiring data, and managing disparate vendors and formats. His stint as a B2B data customer led him to return to the B2B data space and create a product that broadly aggregates company, contact, and custom customer-specific insight data that aligns 1:1 with each customers’ go-to-market strategies.
Custom insights can be any variable that enables targeting of the right businesses. For example,
Does the company offer a mobile app?
Are they a managed service provider?
Do they have a call center?
Do they sell perishable food products?
RevenueBase then builds a custom database for clients that it calls a Revenue Database, which is updated on an ongoing basis.
“We saw a whitespace for a company like RevenueBase, especially given that we’ve seen little real innovation or change in this market over the past decade leading businesspeople to be bombarded with impersonal and poorly targeted messages multiple times a day. This situation has been made worse by ‘The Great Resignation,’ during which so many people have left their positions, and the data hasn’t kept up with those changes. Milenko and I knew that we could build a better solution to make it easier for companies to access more buyers in order to increase revenue. We’re excited to have the support of great investors who are on board with our vision.”
CEO Mark Feldman
RevenueBase will deploy its funds towards building a customer UX and a set of enterprise software integrations for CRMs and MAPs. It is also looking to grow its headcount from twelve to twenty before the end of the year.
“We think the opportunity to be the B2B data refinement layer powering growth-oriented companies is massive,” said Bennett. “We are impressed with RevenueBase’s early traction and Mark’s and Milenko’s appetite to transform the B2B data industry.”
Feldman argues that RevenueBase is distinguished across three dimensions: “completeness of data, data accuracy at scale, and ease.” RevenueBase offers a high-touch, white-glove offering customized to each of its clients. It begins with customer alignment, holding a set of discovery workshops that identify each customer’s “revenue archetype.” RevenueBase then queries its 700 million global contacts database to build tailored databases for its clients.
RevenueBase maintains a database of 700 million global contacts.
Revenue Archetypes consist of an ICP, market segmentation, pains addressed, buyer personas, sales showstoppers, and custom insights that enable buyers to be engaged more personally.
“A revenue archetype is a model of what your ideal customer looks like, i.e., one you can derive revenue from,” Feldman explained to GZ Consulting. “It’s where there is a mutual benefit. They need your product/service and will pay a fair price for it. They also will favor you over the competition because your solution will result in the best cost-benefit tradeoff for the customer.“
Conversely, the Revenue Archetype also defines companies that are not good fits such as industries or geographies that require a standard not met by a firm’s offerings (e.g., HIPAA or GDPR requirements). It also identifies roles not involved in purchasing a company’s products or services. These individuals may be too junior in the organization or may not work in functions that use a company’s products or services.
RevenueBase argues that its knowledge graph technology improves the set of discoverable relationships, including the “longtail of customer-specific insights,” stated Feldman. For example, RevenueBase can identify partners, investors, technologies in use, revenue streams, business models, key resources, and modern industries (such as Fintech and SaaS) that do not fall into standard industry classifications.
Conventional firmographics vendors must have a product manager pre-define the company attributes to be collected and then build these definitions into its data collection methodology and structure. Because RevenueBase employs a graph database, it is not subject to these structural limitations and can identify uncommon or industry-specific elements that define the ICP. The data structure also supports multi-point verification and data attribution. In addition, data fields with high probabilities of changing, such as email addresses, job titles, and current employers, are re-verified at least four times per year.
RevenueBase promises to “replace all of your data vendors with one solution” that “reaches every company and decision-maker across the globe that will benefit from your unique offering.” By delivering high-quality, targeted data directly to sales and marketing systems, revenue teams avoid time-consuming sales rep data research and managing databases. Data quality steps include custom research, quarterly email re-verification, and annual phone checks. Data is delivered via a quarterly secure CSV file transfer with a 90% accuracy SLA.
Clearbit announced the general availability of its Data Activation Platform. The new service helps B2B marketing teams “focus on creating demand, capturing intent, and optimizing their pipeline.”
The Data Activation Platform addresses the “business imperative for companies to have real-time intelligence about their target market, ideal customers, and engaged prospects.” It then applies this intelligence across all stages of the customer’s journey.
The Data Activation Platform offers Clearbit customers a user interface for many of the features that were previously only supported as APIs.
“Data activation is specifically around the next step of how we’re helping companies put data to work,” explained CRO Kevin Tate to GZ Consulting. “We started with the data. How do you collect data and make it available so that companies can be smart as they engage your customers in the market? And then, over the last three years, four years, what we’ve gotten to see is how these very fast-growing companies and their growth engineering teams and go-to-market teams have put our data to work in all these different customer touchpoints. Until this Data Activation Platform, the way they put that data to work was through APIs and integrations that they stitch together.”
“We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the most innovative B2B growth teams in the world, and they’ve taught us that it’s not just about having good data. It’s about activating that data to improve your funnel from top to bottom,” said Ross Moser, CEO of Clearbit. “The ability to apply real-time intelligence to each step of the customer journey – and optimize experiences in real-time – is what’s driving success for Clearbit’s customers.”
Clearbit company and visitor intelligence
The Data Activation Platform leverages Clearbit’s heritage as a data company. Its database spans 44 million companies with over 100 firmographic and demographic attributes. Clearbit also maintains data on 350 million contacts. Marketers can target audiences, enrich their CRMs and MAPs, and personalize their website and customer experience apps. Capabilities include
Clearbit Reveal visitor intelligence for tying anonymous users to firms and detecting website visitor intent
Audience management and segmentation based on data ingested from a company’s CRM, MAP, or CDP. Alerts may be triggered to activate audiences across systems.
Real-time enrichment for short webforms.
Real-time integrations and APIs
Audiences can be targeted in multiple ways. For example, marketers can deploy audiences on Facebook and Google:
Prospect Audiences target employees across the complete ICP, including account expansion to new prospects outside the CRM. Targeting may be filtered by role and seniority, providing persona-level targeting across the ICP.
Contact Audiences that sync all matches to a contacts audience for retargeting on Facebook and Google
Site Visitor Audiences that retarget web visitors when they match on Facebook and Google.
Data syncing includes “Audience inclusion attributes” or “smart attributes” that are calculated, such as a Boolean ICP or current customer flags that can be pushed downstream to Salesforce and other platforms. The refreshed value is automatically pushed to downstream systems if the calculation is modified. Smart attributes are updated every fifteen minutes.
Clearbit partners include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Segment, Drift, Intercom, Chili Piper, Slack, Zapier, Qualified, and Clari. Personalization partners that leverage Clearbit Reveal include Uberflip, Optimizely, and Mutiny.
Clearbit is coming off a “big, big growth year” but does not disclose any sizing or growth details. LinkedIn lists it with 177 employees, up 90% over the past year. Business Development and Sales grew at a 150% pace. While Clearbit originally targeted B2B Internet service companies, it is gaining traction in financial services, retail services, and investments, businesses that are “looking for data, to power their intelligence, their go-to-market motions,” said Tate.
Sales Engagement vendor SalesLoft announced that it acquired professional services partner InStereo. InStereo, founded in 2018 by Bill Galfano and Adam Post, was an early ecosystem partner that has grown alongside SalesLoft. Last year, SalesLoft named them their “Partner of the Year.”
“We were impressed by their focus on what the customer is trying to achieve,” SalesLoft President and Chief Strategy Officer Rob Forman told GZ Consulting.
As a partner, InStereo helped “B2B Sales and Marketing teams better engage with buyers to create more demand, authentically engage prospects, and convert prospects into delighted customers.”
“Bringing InStereo directly into the SalesLoft family is a key way we are investing in our customers’ success. Our customers will benefit from InStereo’s deep understanding of buyer journeys and engagement strategies. Their experience and proven enterprise methodologies will help customers operationalize the SalesLoft platform and accelerate the value of Sales Engagement across their entire revenue organization.”
SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter
InStereo focuses on go-to-market and implementation strategy for SalesLoft, HubSpot, and Salesforce delivered through a pair of consulting services:
Buyer Experience Strategy focuses on the buyer’s journey, ICP, demand unit persona, and the “buyer engagement blueprint.”
“We believe customer journey maps are more than just wall art,” states InStereo. “We create buyer journeys you can activate. By understanding how buyers approach the purchase process, sales and marketing teams can better align people, process, and content to deliver just what buyers need, when they need it.”
Buyer Engagement Services pairs clients with a Strategist and Revenue Consultant to assist with enterprise software implementations. For SalesLoft, they focus on “1:1, personalized engagement via cadences” and process automation. For marketing automation, InStereo assists with nurture campaigns and optimization, and for CRM, they focus on leveraging CRM capabilities and improving data quality. Other services include SalesLoft Admin as a Service and sales development services.
“At SalesLoft, our goal isn’t to just sell software; it’s to help our customers exceed their revenue goals,” said SalesLoft CRO Steve Goldberg. “Too many times software companies focus on features and technology, not the success of their customers. InStereo shares our passion for helping our customers get the outcomes they’re looking for.”
InStereo’s customers skew towards enterprise implementations. SalesLoft “plans to take their methodologies into new areas of our business,” expanding InStereo beyond the technology vertical into financial services, SalesLoft’s second-largest vertical.
InStereo has completed over 150 customer engagements. Joint customers include Cargill, Pegasystems, and 3M.
“This past year we tripled our investment into our alliance organization and programs because empowering our partners leads to success for our customers,” said Forman. “InStereo leveraged the power of our partnership and consistently drove incredible outcomes for our mutual customers.”
All twenty InStereo employees will be joining SalesLoft, including their two founders and Carrie McGrew, InStereo’s VP of Strategy. In addition, Galfano will be joining the CRO Leadership Team as the SVP of Consulting Services.
SalesLoft did not provide any pricing deals on the acquisition.
A sample RevenueBase ICP built during the initial discovery workshop (additional sections include personas and technology).
Instead of building the ICP on commonly available firmographic variables, the ICP is customer service based and defined through the discovery process. A bespoke taxonomy is created that applies custom tags by persona, industry, size, etc.
“We want to align your database with your go-to-market strategy,” Feldman told GZ Consulting.
RevenueBase promises to “replace all of your data vendors with one solution” that “reaches every company and decision-maker across the globe that will benefit from your unique offering.” By delivering high-quality, targeted data, revenue teams can shift from managing databases and researching prospects to creating campaigns and focusing on selling.
RevenueBase employs AI for aggregating and integrating its multi-sourced data with the AI building a quality hierarchy for selecting which field to accept when vendors disagree on a value. The research team assists the AI modeling by collecting training data.
Data quality steps include custom research, quarterly email re-verification, and annual phone checks. Data is delivered via a quarterly secure CSV file transfer with a 90% accuracy SLA.
Content includes standard firmographics, mined and licensed business descriptions, sizing ranges, industry codes (SIC, NAICS, and custom), contact information, and technographics. Funding data includes total funding, most recent round amount, and most recent round date. While full family trees are not available, locations are tied to parent companies.
Contact data includes mobile numbers, direct numbers, LinkedIn URLs, tenure at current job, work addresses, and mapped persona.
RevenueBase has already aggregated 700 million business contacts and 100 million companies, providing it with one of the most extensive sets of contacts in the industry.
RevenueBase combines firmographics, technographics, and custom data insights collected by its research team.
Intent data and sales triggers are not currently available.
RevenueBase provides opt-out notifications to its customers, letting them know when an individual has opted out of their database or the database of one of their contributing vendors. It also suppresses California mobile numbers in support of CCPA.
RevenueBase is off to a strong start. Since soft launching the service in October, they have generated $800,000 in revenue and have a $500,000 ARR. Early success has allowed it to launch the service without accepting outside funding.
The firm is still in the early stages of development. It has focused on building its content aggregation model, custom research, and customer service/discovery model based upon Feldman’s experience as both a B2B marketer and data industry executive. As such, RevenueBase has an advanced DaaS vision but does not yet have APIs and connectors for data delivery. However, it has a unique approach that is gaining early market traction. Initial customers include Siemens, PTC, Localytics, SolidWorks, and CB Insights.
RevenueBase is sold as a flat-rate subscription service between $50,000 and $100,000 per annum. Additional fees are applied for custom research. RevenueBase is headquartered in Boston.
RevenueBase, which describes itself as a Revenue Database as a Service (RDaaS), formally launched on Tuesday as a “one-stop data solution” that recognizes data as a “strategic asset for a business.”
According to 2016 research by SiriusDecisions, marketing databases are riddled with critical errors with bad data ranging from ten to twenty-five percent of records. SiriusDecisions noted that the firms with higher data quality have shifted from periodic data cleansing projects with discrete completion dates to data maintenance processes with “ongoing policies and procedures to maintain data quality.”
RevenueBase was founded by industry veteran Mark Feldman, the VP of Marketing at NetProspex prior to its acquisition by Dun & Bradstreet. As a marketing head at Backupify, Motion Recruitment, and Localytics, Feldman became frustrated with B2B data issues, including misalignment with the sales and marketing team’s go-to-market strategy, data decay, difficulty acquiring data, and managing disparate vendors and formats. His stint as a B2B data customer led him to return to the B2B data space and create an RDaaS company that broadly aggregates company, contact, and technographic data that aligns 1:1 with customers’ go-to-market strategies. It then builds a custom database for clients that it calls a Revenue Database, which is updated on an ongoing basis.
“When I was hired to run growth operations at Localytics, a web and mobile app analytics company, my first directive from the CEO was to put together a list of target accounts to assign to our new enterprise account executives. It was my first week and my reputation was on the line. I started by going to our data vendor and asking them to help me build a list of all of the companies in the world that were focused on mobile monetization strategies across millions of monthly active users. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Nope.
My list for Localytics was full of bad data. There was no way to confirm the companies listed had the mobile monetization opportunities that our software could solve, or that mobile monetization opportunities would be high up on their list of priorities. I quickly realized that, in the B2B world, not all data is created equal. Right then and there, I saw an opportunity to change the B2B data game by solving the major growth impediment challenges facing revenue leaders—acquiring, integrating and maintaining the quality of their data—by building the world’s first Revenue Database as a Service.”
RevenueBase CEO Mark Feldman
“Like so many B2B marketers, I was frustrated with the inadequacies of traditional list providers,” wrote Feldman. “I saw an opportunity to revolutionize the B2B data game and solve the greatest challenges facing revenue leaders today. Our all-in-one Revenue Database as a Service solution provides next-level data quality, expediency, and accuracy. We transform your data stack from a constant struggle into your greatest asset.”
RevenueBase takes a white-glove approach to serve its customers. Revenue Archetypes are defined during customer workshops and consist of an ICP, market segmentation, pains addressed, buyer personas, sales showstoppers, and “jobs to be done.” The Jobs-to-be-Done descriptor is a bit misleading as it is account, not persona-based. Jobs-to-be-Done describes the core functional “job” that an organization is trying to accomplish.
Personas cover function, level, titles, buying unit members, demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
RevenueBase then builds a revenue database for its clients and supplements it with custom data collected by its overseas team of fifty editorial researchers.
“A revenue archetype is a model of what your ideal customer looks like, i.e., one you can derive revenue from,” said Feldman. “It’s where there is a mutual benefit. They need your product/service and will pay a fair price for it. They also will favor you over the competition because your solution will result in the best cost-benefit tradeoff for the customer.“
Conversely, the Revenue Archetype also defines companies that are not good fits (e.g., industries or geographies that require a standard not met by a firm’s offerings, such as HIPAA or GDPR). It also identifies roles not involved in purchasing a company’s products or services. These individuals may be too junior in the organization or not work in functions that use a company’s products or services.
Coverage continues with a discussion of RevenueBase’s ICP modeling and database.
Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu has added a set of Workflow Triggers that take automated actions based upon CRM data updates. As Vainu enriches CRMs with financial data mined from European registered data filings, it has raw, current data for triggering activities. Admins set up the trigger rules, and Vainu creates “smart actions” such as creating CRM Tasks, adding a row in Google Sheets, or sending a Slack notice.
For example, a Workflow Trigger may be set up to look for SaaS companies that meet the “Rule of 40” condition (revenue growth plus profitability margin).
Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen notes that trigger rules and ratios will vary by industry and may include custom rules specific to each of Vainu’s customers. Thus, the Rule of 40 “is typical of the software industry but isn’t that critical for other businesses. For being truly data-driven, each company has its own magic numbers based on the data points of their interest.”
Vainu claims that it supports thousands of data points for triggered workflows, kicking off both sales notifications and custom marketing messages associated with each trigger.
“Some people might want to know when a company starts using lead capture forms on its website. Someone else might want to be alerted as soon as a company adds a new environmental standard to their corporate social responsibility web page. Or when a company appoints a new CEO. Or when it adds an auxiliary name that includes the word ‘restaurant’ in it. The most valuable trigger event is often a change in that specific event.”
Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen
Along with data changes, actions may be based upon any of seventy event triggers or new accounts meeting ICP criteria.
Vainu, headquartered in Helsinki, emphasizes the value of dynamic data fed into enterprise platforms. Dynamic data ensures that decision-making is based upon timely and accurate data. It also allows salespeople to be customer-centric.
“By having access to data that informs them of the current situation of an organization, as well as what recent changes the organization has undergone, salespeople are able to tailor their messaging and offer a personalized experience,” blogged Vainu marketer Nikolai Bang. Vainu covers nearly thirty million companies across Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom. Triggers are based upon the licensed countries.
GrowFlare, which I profiled a few weeks ago, doubled its coverage of US active companies to 250,000. While a few additional large firms were included, the bulk of the growth was at the SMB end of the market. GrowFlare nearly doubled the number of companies with $10 million to $50 Million, bringing that set to 50,000. The coverage of firms with less than $10 million in revenue quadrupled to 170,000 SMBs. Profiles include firmographics and psychographics, the common phrases that firms use to describe themselves and their markets.
GrowFlare employs a Fit Score, which is the level of similarity between a company and one or multiple companies provided to GrowFlare. When the new set of companies was added, they were immediately included in the Active Lists (dynamic company lists of prospects) as Alerts. The new companies are also available for prospecting and research via a Chrome extension.
“We’re continuing to grow organically and invest 100% of revenue into the platform,” wrote CEO Matt Belkin.
Upcoming GrowFlare development is focused on expanded partnerships. GrowFlare is looking to add contacts from vendors such as InsideView and deepen its integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce.
While many companies offer keyword searching, it is usually against a mined business description. Only a few products, such as D&B Hoover’s Conceptual Searching, provide broader topical searching to build company lists.
GrowFlare includes a free Chrome extension that “overlays the power of prospector right over the website,” HubSpot, or Salesforce. “This is invaluable for anyone from an SDR
to an executive that wants a quick ten-second snapshot of a company before engaging,” said Belkin. The Chrome connector detects the account, displays firmographics, trending topics, psychographics, and Next Best Prospect.
Prospector Bulk and GoldMiner support HubSpot append and enrichment, including Fit Scores. Salesforce support is a roadmap item. Belkin said that HubSpot support was a “strategic decision because HubSpot is more readily accessible, cheaper to develop for, more startup-focused, and we can build adoption faster.”
The user interface is clean and well laid out, with the ability to quickly sort prospecting tables and view additional details. The company universe is limited to 130,000 US companies with ten or more employees “that have meaningful purchasing power.” Thus, GrowFlare is best suited for US account based marketers and strategic teams. However, the service is still in its early stages of development. It does not offer any contacts, and the firmographic intelligence, beyond the psychographics and trends, is limited. There are some novel ideas and tools in this service, many of which are not found in more mature ICP offerings from the established players (e.g. DiscoverOrg AccountView, InsideView Apex, D&B DataVision). These ICP / TAM tools were built for the marketing department, while GrowFlare is looking to serve both the sales and marketing departments with some competitive intelligence functionality as well.
GrowFlare is a freemium offering, with three free prospects provided with each search. The Basic offering is priced at $2,950 per annum and includes ten prospects per list. Growth offers 25 prospects per list for $4,950, and Unlimited offers the maximum number of relevant prospects per list for $9,950. The paid offerings all include all of the features discussed in this profile along with 24/7 support.
The 2.0 release has helped the firm gain traction in the marketplace with revenue up 600% monthly (on a small base). The average deal size is greater than $10,000. Upcoming GrowFlare development is focused on expanded partnerships. GrowFlare is looking to add contacts from vendors such as InsideView and deepen its integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce.
