Tag: InsideView

2016 in Review: Sales Intelligence Content

InsideView Coverage as of April 2016.
InsideView Coverage as of April 2016.

One of the most straightforward ways to increase the value-add of a Sales Intelligence Service is to expand the content it delivers to its users.  Generally, a vendor can license additional content within the same general category (e.g. more contacts) or expand coverage into new content categories not previously supported by the product.  The first approach is usually faster and less expensive as there is limited development involved in adding additional coverage within a currently supported category (assuming the vendor is not hitting up against platform limits), but there are still costs involved with licensing, de-duping, and merging content sets.  As such, it is much more common for firms to increase the scope of current data sets than to add entirely new content categories to their services.

So which of the fourteen sales intelligence vendors discussed in my new Sales Intelligence book invested in increasing their depth of coverage?  Basically, all of them.  Of course, the scope of content investment varied greatly:

  1. Avention roughly doubled their global company, contact, and email coverage.  Their product now spans sixty million companies, eighty million contacts, and twenty million emails (US and UK).  I previously discussed their AsiaPac expansion, but the coverage expansion was global with most of the new content outside of the US, UK, and Canada where they already had significant depth.
  2. DiscoverOrg also greatly increased its coverage as it grew to 60,000 editorially researched company profiles and one million researched contacts.  Over the past twelve months, DiscoverOrg had a 91% increase in company coverage, 134% increase in contact coverage, and a 371% increase in non-IT contact coverage (numbers supplied by DiscoverOrg). The non-IT increase was due to an expansion of their job functions datasets to include Product Management (TEDD), Sales, CxO, and HR.  The firm also continued to invest in their marketing dataset.  CMO Katie Bullard noted that “the Marketing budget has begun to meet or exceed the IT department budget in many companies and vendors” while “service providers selling into marketing continue to proliferate.”
  3. RainKing continues to build out its company and contact coverage and expects to hit one million executives by the end of 2016. The firm roughly doubled the number of decision makers in its database while extending its international coverage. They also have increased the number of marketing, finance, and HR decision makers.
  4. InsideView’s executive coverage grew to 17 million US contacts and 8 million European contacts. Total global contacts more than doubled to 31 million and global emails grew by 10 million to 17 million.
  5. Bureau van Dijk added RepRisk environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk reports to their service while continuing to build out their company database.  At the end of the year, Bureau van Dijk provided close to 210 million active and inactive company profiles
  6. DueDil rolled out enhanced financials for UK and Irish registered companies. Along with performance and growth metrics such as EBITDA and multiple CAGRs (compounded annual growth rates), DueDil is providing historical graphs for key metrics. In total, six new metrics and 12 key performance indicators (KPIs) have been added.
  7. Data.com expanded the Dun & Bradstreet content displayed in a new Prospect Insights view.  Extended company intelligence includes D&B WorldBase firmographics and linkage, Hoover’s top company descriptions and competitors, and First Research industry overviews with call prep questions and industry summaries.
  8. Infofree grew its executive email file to 26 million.
  9. Salesgenie raised its business email count to 58 million US contacts.
  10. Owler’s primary focus in 2016 was to expand their Competitive Graph and gather additional company intelligence. The Competitive Graph improved as the user base has grown and the firm has implemented a set of data cards (simple user queries such as is company X a competitor of company Y) which help refine sizing data, competitors, and a few other firmographic topics.  Revenue and employee figures have grown to 2.7 million companies.
  11. Zoominfo expanded its set of company enrichment variables with the addition of 200 new Company Attributes in October 2016.
  12. LinkedIn continues to add two members per second.  At the end of the year, they delivered 467 million global profiles across ten million companies.
  13. Dun & Bradstreet grew its WorldBase file of global companies to 265 million active and inactive firms.  Over the past few years, they have also focused on improving the depth and accuracy of their international file.

So who did I omit?  Technically Artesian Solutions did not make the content list, but that is simply because their new US edition will be discussed in the new product category.  Likewise, InsideView’s Tech Profiler Premium is also being discussed as a new product.

InsideView: CRM Connector Enhancements

The new Discovery Center provides company insights, firmographics, and contacts for 12 million global companies.
The new Discovery Center provides company insights, firmographics, and contacts for 12 million global companies.

Sales Intelligence vendor InsideView released a pair of enhanced connectors for Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics 365.  The Microsoft connector is the next generation of their Dynamics partnership.  The Salesforce Target connector provides company and contact prospecting within the AppExchange.

Insights version 4.0 is being released as part of MS Dynamics 365.  Said InsideView, “Insights 4.0 is more deeply embedded in the sales workflow than ever, so sellers can quickly find data, insights, and connections wherever they are within their Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment and use that intelligence to close deals faster.”

InsideView lists the following new capabilities:

  • Global contact filtering to assist with contact discovery
  • A new Discovery Center for searching InsideView’s universe of global companies.  Discovery Center supports company searching against companies not yet added as accounts. Users can view firmographic data, key contacts, and company news. Users can add companies as accounts or to a Watchlist.
  • Custom field mapping
  • Social feed suppression to enable/disable social media integration and social media stream customization

“Microsoft is the only major CRM provider to embed external customer data, millions of key contacts, and timely, actionable insights within CRM at no additional cost. That’s leadership,” said Heidi Tucker, VP of Global Alliances at InsideView. “Buyers expect salespeople to be relevant, understand their business issues, and come prepared with meaningful solutions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 subscribers get that advantage included with their CRM Online license. All they have to do is turn it on. And now, it’s even easier with Insights 4.0.”

Contact Insights include news. co-workers, connections, buzz (twitter, Facebook, blogs), and conversation starters.
Contact Insights include news. co-workers, connections, buzz (twitter, Facebook, blogs), and conversation starters.

Insights is bundled into the following MS Dynamics products: Dynamics CRM Online Professional and Enterprise, Dynamics 365 Plan 1 and Plan 2, Dynamics 365 for Sales, Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, Dynamics 365 for Field Service, and Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation.

InsideView also announced immediate availability of InsideView Target for Salesforce which provides company and contact prospecting from within SFDC.  Target provides dynamic list building using firmographic, biographic, and technographic variables.  Screening variables include eighteen high-precision trigger events, news keywords, the presence of emails or phones, and technologies employed (2,200 categories across 525,000 companies).  Trigger events (“InsideView Agents”) and news go out as far as thirty days and may be combined with keywords (e.g. Partnership triggers mentioning Apple).

Although the InsideView database contains global companies, screening variables are not internationalized beyond country and international region.  Revenue sizing is in US dollars and there are no international industry codes, indexes, or sub-regions.

InsideView Target Technology Screening
InsideView Target Technology Screening

Other features include deduplication, custom field mapping, saved searches, and one-click pushing of records to Eloqua and Marketo.

InsideView provides a screenable dataset of 12 million global companies and 30 million “director-and-above decision-makers.”  InsideView positions their smaller dataset as a valuable feature.  “No noise, no mom-and-pop companies, and none of the clutter from lower-level contacts and tiny businesses.”

Earlier this year, InsideView released a refreshed user interface for their sales product on the AppExchange along with the automated Refresh hygiene service.

InsideView Target is sold on a pre-purchased credit basis.  Both company and contact records are counted towards the contract allotment.  If a record has been previously purchased during the contract period, the marketer is not charged a second time.

InsideView has invested heavily in CRM and MAP connectors over the past five years.  They support a broad set of partner platforms with rich content and functionality.

Marketo Account Based Marketing

Marketo is joining the ABM party, having noticed that many of its LaunchPoint partners have been advocating ABM for the past year while their chief rival joined an ABM alliance six months ago.  Oracle and Demandbase launched a joint solution back in April, the ABM Leadership Alliance.  Meanwhile, Terminus has been running Flip My Funnel tradeshows for the past year.  As CMS Critic wrote a bit snidely, “Account Based Marketing (ABM) is the new acronym on the block – Marketo just made sure of it.”

In a companion whitepaper, Marketo wrote, “Today, more B2B organizations than ever are shifting their thinking toward account-centricity. For organizations looking for a high return on investment (ROI), executives need to think in terms of high-value accounts, account penetration, market penetration, and logos. And so a marketing strategy that partners with sales to focus your combined energy on a more targeted approach to finding, engaging, and closing the accounts that really matter naturally aligns to the C-suite and the organization’s strategic goals.”

Marketo ABM supports three sub-processes:

  1. Target and Manage: Account Targeting via account and lead level scoring.
  2. Engage across Channels: Engage Accounts and decision makers across multiple channels including email, web, ads, events, social, and mobile and leverage customer behaviors captured in Marketo Audience Hub to tailor messages.
  3. Measure Your Impact: Refine messaging and channel selection via analytics.  Marketo tools include ABM dashboards, account dashboards (profiles), named account dashboards, and account lists.

For capabilities not supported directly by Marketo, the firms suggests customers look to partner solutions within LaunchPoint for predictive analytics, account enrichment, advanced advertising technology, and account based sales automation.

Marketo's Named Account Dashboard highlights the top individuals at a named account and their recent activity. Other metrics include firmographics, email performance indicators, pipeline value, and web activity.
Marketo’s Named Account Dashboard highlights the top individuals at a named account and their recent activity. Other metrics include firmographics, email performance indicators, pipeline value, and web activity.

“While marketing and sales teams have long been doing account targeting, the technology hasn’t been available to reach and engage accounts – and the decision makers within them – in a coordinated, scalable way from one place,” said Marketo CMO Chandar Pattabhiram.  “Built natively within the Marketo platform, Marketo ABM provides account teams with all of the necessary tools to discover, manage, engage, and analyze the accounts with the most revenue potential, thus driving revenue from their most valuable accounts and delivering higher return on their sales and marketing investments.”

InsideView Infographic
InsideView Infographic

InsideView is one of a dozen launch partners for Marketo ABM.  According to an InsideView press release, “InsideView targeting intelligence for ABM provides a new way for companies to leverage insights that fuel account scoring, lead-to-account mapping, and the high quality and depth of InsideView’s account and contact data. InsideView’s ABM solution helps align both sales and marketing with a consistent view of accounts and contacts across marketing automation and CRM systems and coordinated campaign execution.”

In support of the partnership, InsideView offers an ABM Acceleration Kit and the InsideView API for maintaining CRM and marketing automation data along with account and contact insights.  The Acceleration Kit helps with ideal account targeting, account alerting, and access to corporate family trees and buying committee member intelligence.

“Targeted data based on rich, contextual insights is the secret sauce for ABM,” said Marc Perramond, VP Product Management, InsideView. “Reorienting your marketing and sales to focus on accounts is a huge undertaking for many companies, so it’s critical to get account selection right. If you don’t, no ABM actions will work. We’re doing everything we can to make our customers’ ABM initiatives successful on whatever level works best for them. A bundled solution for a quick jump-start, APIs for a more do-it-yourself model, and a partnership with Marketo to ensure seamless execution and visibility into ABM efforts.”

Predictive Analytics company Everstring was also named a launch partner.  According to their press release, “EverString helps B2B companies expand, prioritize, and enrich their marketing and sales databases. EverString Audience Platform accomplishes this by combining applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with the broadest set of data signals from more than 27 million companies.”

The other launch partners include AdRoll, Bluewolf, Digital Pi, Dun & Bradstreet, Elixiter, Fathom, LeadMD, Owler, Perkuto, and PFL.

“The combination of Marketo ABM with Dun & Bradstreet’s data, analytics, and insights will enable our customers to precisely identify their highest-potential accounts and effectively engage them across online and offline channels,” said Dun & Bradstreet General Manager Michael Bird.

One key area Marketo doesn’t address in their press release and supporting whitepaper is mapping leads to accounts.  Perhaps this falls into LaunchPoint account enrichment, but the Marketo database and workflows are built around leads (people), not accounts.  Unless leads are immediately mapped to accounts, they will exist in a nether world outside of ABM management.  Last week, I wrote about LeanData which offers inbound lead-to-account matching.  Avention’s Eloqua Connector (next story) is another example of real-time lead matching to accounts.

Sales Intelligence Vendors Still Don’t Get Social

For some reason, sales intelligence vendors have never properly understood social selling and how to integrate social media into their products.  This has long amazed me.  Instead of building an integrated social media viewing tool with sharing and feedback, they all seem to nibble around the edges. You’ll find social hyperlinks directly from company or contact profiles, but these simply window out to the social media site.  Also fairly common is the inclusion of corporate blogs into their news and sales trigger feeds, but fully integrated social media tools have yet to be offered by vendors.

The closest any of them have come is InsideView which added a Buzz Tab about five years ago to its InsideView for Sales product.  The Buzz Tab provides a consolidated view of blogs, Facebook, and Twitter feeds.  However, the social content remains segregated from their other discovery tools and the population of Facebook and Twitter feeds is limited.  Other social tools include a Who Knows Who “Six Degrees” tool and the inclusion of Personal Tweets from business executives in their alerts.

The InsideView buzz tab supports keyword searching and filtering for company blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
The InsideView buzz tab supports keyword searching and filtering for company blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

There are also a set of social selling tools that focus on social media, blogs, and news but which are light on company and contact information.  As these tools improve, one of the sales intelligence vendors is going to make a build vs. buy decision and either OEM the upcoming service or buy a social selling service outright.

What tools such as Artesian Software, Owler, Contify, and Trapit do isn’t revolutionary.  They basically provide a unified view of news and social content.  Users can filter the feeds and interact with the posts.  If a free service such as Owler can build such functionality, why can’t the sales intelligence vendors?  Core functionality could provide the following features:

  1. A deep set of direct links for companies and executives to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, G+, etc.
  2. A unified view of the corporate social media content across Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare, YouTube, Vimeo, corporate blogs, business blogs, etc.  This view would be easily filterable by source, date, keyword, etc.
  3. Social Media Metrics for a company charted over time.  If the company is also selling into the marketing department, then comparative metrics should be available.
  4. When filtering Twitter, allow the user to see both the Tweets from a company and mentions (these are separate options).
  5. Support basic widgets from the major social media vendors.  These are small applets that display key statistics along with a brief description and logo/headshot.
  6. Allow any news article, sales trigger, or social media post to be shared via social media, enterprise social (e.g. Chatter, Yammer), and email.
  7. Support expanded alerts that include targeted social media alongside sales triggers.  Thus, an alert could consist of the half dozen most important sales trigger topics, Twitter posts from the company, Blog headlines, and YouTube / Vimeo uploads.
  8. Executive alerts based upon social media posts and news mentions.

Who Know Who Six degree tools are also worth considering, but this functionality is so well locked up by LinkedIn that relationship discovery tools have remained a standalone category.  Amongst Sales Intelligence vendors, only InsideView and DueDil Connect have built relationship finder tools in competition with LinkedIn.

To be fair, the sales intelligence vendors all understood early on that they needed to work with LinkedIn.  Most of them adopted the LinkedIn widget or the LinkedIn API to provide relationship and executive intelligence into their service.  But then LinkedIn decided it was going to offer its own sales intelligence service called Sales Navigator and began blocking sales intelligence vendor access to LinkedIn.  Since then, with the exception of InsideView, the sales intelligence firms have done little to integrate social content into their services.  Hopefully, the vendors begin to see this gap in their offerings and begin to address it.

InsideView Tech Profiler Released

InsideView announced availability of a technology vendor dataset called Tech Profiler.  The premium will be available via InsideView for Sales, InsideView Target, and Open API.  The new dataset spans 525,000 global companies across 2,100 technologies.

The API offers two calls: retrieve technology implemented at a company and retrieve companies that have deployed specific technologies.

InsideView for Sales Tech Profiler
InsideView for Sales Tech Profiler

“Adding technology information to our market intelligence platform gives technology sellers and marketers deeper insight into their prospects,” said Jenny Cheng, chief product officer at InsideView. “Tech Profiler has ten times the coverage of other technology profile solutions in the industry. Add that to all the other firmographic and demographic data plus the social insights InsideView offers and the result is an incredibly powerful tool for anyone selling technology to businesses. It’s all the intelligence you need in one platform.”

Technology targeting can be used for both competitive takeout and identifying complementary technology.  For example, technology vendors (e.g. Hardware, Software, Communications, Information Services, IT Consultants) may be looking for customers of Salesforce because they compete against Salesforce or because they are part of SFDC’s ecosystem.

InsideView did not disclose pricing or the source of their data.

Campaign Stars Content as a Service + InsideView Targeting

The InsideView - Campaign Stars joint value proposition in three easy steps.
The InsideView – Campaign Stars joint value proposition in three easy steps.

Content as a Service vendor Campaign Stars has partnered with sales and marketing intelligence firm InsideView to deliver InsideView Target within the Campaign Stars platform.  According to Campaign Stars, “Marketers enjoy jumps in conversion rates of 45% or more when combining audience segmentation with content optimization.”

“Campaign Stars’ clients simply share their brand’s vision and insight via their collaboration platform, purchase credits that are redeemable for any number of services, and select what assets they need. Campaign Stars then targets their audience, creates the content, delivers it via the client’s marketing automation software, and then tracks campaign performance across dozens of key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketers can buy more credits whenever they need, and they never have to exhaust their own bandwidth to create engaging content,” said Campaign Stars CEO Henry Bruckstein.

Campaign Stars provides both the digital content platform and editorial staff for creating, targeting, and distributing content.  InsideView Target provides a segmented list of potential prospects for outbound marketing.  Campaign Stars features include analytics, A/B testing, and project management tools.

Campaign Stars assigns two creative teams to projects, allowing them to separately develop and test content against a sample of targeted prospects.  The two campaigns are then compared across a set of key performance indicators.  This process, called Campaign Optimization, results in the more effective campaign being rolled out broadly.

“Our commitment is always to help our customers get the best results possible from their content campaigns,” said Bruckstein. “Our partnership with InsideView gives CampaignStars marketers integrated access to over 25 million B2B contacts across 800 industries. It’s like a turbo charge for your campaign.”

To entice InsideView customers to test out Campaign Stars, the firms are offering Campaign Stars credits to InsideView customers.

“Campaign Stars gives you something to say; InsideView gives you the right contacts to say it to,” said Heidi Tucker, VP Alliances at InsideView. “By partnering, customers now get both the fuel and the engine. Together, we are a total one-stop shop for market intelligence, content creation, and delivery automation – the entire journey, as easy as saying ‘Go.'”

Since launching its API a few years ago, InsideView has been very aggressive in identifying emerging opportunities for partnership.  In March, they announced licensing deals with ABSD vendors QuotaFactory and SalesLoft.

Campaign Stars is also a partner of Quota Factory.  “You can harness the power of the ultimate marketing one-two punch. Create engaging content faster than ever before to drive more qualified leads, and convert more of those leads than you ever thought possible with QuotaFactory’s dynamic PRM system,” said Bruckstein about their joint value proposition.  “Identify more prospects, qualify more leads, and convert more sales. Guide your customers along the buying journey every step of the way with an uninterrupted stream of high-octane content, and get them across the finish line with a multi-faceted cascade of targeted, effective follow-up communication.”

Campaign Stars lists partnerships with the major B2B marketing automation platforms.  They also list DiscoverOrg as a partner, but the partnership has yet to be formally announced.

InsideView for Sales: Download Limits

InsideView’s new download limits take effect for all InsideView Sales customers on June 1st.  Going forward, users will only receive 500 company and 500 contact credits per month.  The maximum size of a download file remains 2,000 records.  These limits are well below those of their top two competitors, Hoover’s and Avention; InsideView now heavily targets the marketing function, so they are becoming miserly with respect to downloads in their flagship sales offering.

Customers looking for broader limits can license InsideView Target, their prospecting service for marketers.

InsideView also announced a set of enhancements, the most important of which was InsideView Target’s one-click list Send to Eloqua feature.  Target checks for duplicate contacts based on emails, ensuring that uploaded prospects are net-new.  Marketo connector functionality is also available.

InsideView Target now supports Eloqua synch with duplicate checking.
InsideView Target now supports Eloqua synch with duplicate checking.

Other May release announcements were fairly minor:

  • The mobile product displays 90 days of news instead of 30.
  • InsideView for CRM provides direct access to the full InsideView company or executive profile by clicking on the name.
  • InsideView Target added saved searches.

InsideView: Refreshing its SFDC Connector

IV Refresh

Refresh, InsideView’s Salesforce enrichment service, exited beta and is now generally available to customers.  Their AppExchange service provides automatic, continuous updates to CRM records “so that marketers and sellers can improve their response rates, get more qualified leads, and win more deals.”

The service updates incorrect information, appends missing fields, and provides duplicate management.  To ensure administrative control, Refresh supports a “rule-based system with overrides.”  Up to 40 fields are refreshed.  Admins may also setup custom fields for enrichment.  Salesforce Admins set the frequency to daily, weekly, or monthly.

One of the initial features is the ability to segment your database with different enrichment rules and update frequencies.  Accounts can only be assigned to a single segment with a maximum of five segments.  Outside of segmenting by international region or corporate divisions, I’m not sure why sales operations would set different rules for different accounts.  It seems like a way to overly complicate data hygiene management.

The system provides admins two sets of alerts: the first notifies that matching has completed, and the second provides enrichment counts by fields.

InsideView Refresh email alerts notify the SFDC Admin that updates are pending approval.
InsideView Refresh email alerts notify the SFDC Admin that updates are pending approval.

Match scores are employed with a score of 100 assigned to any manually matched records (either by the admin or sales rep).  Scores at or above 70 are viewed as auto-matched and enriched.  Scores of 31 to 69 are available for review but not automatically enriched.

Subscription hygiene services provide broad-based benefits across multiple functions and workflows.  In their product video, InsideView states that if companies don’t clean their marketing databases “it can severely choke your revenue operations.  Poor data quality leads to lost productivity and lower revenue.  For sales, it means wasted time and lost opportunities; for marketing, it means lower response rates and a shrinking pipeline; and for business operations, it means you’re on the hook to clean up the mess.  You can’t afford to ignore the problem, yet most businesses aren’t prepared to address the complexity of their data and systems.”

The InsideView database currently spans 12 million prospectable companies and 30 million contacts.  Company data is licensed from Equifax, Business Week (Capital IQ), Cortera, and Reuters.  Additional contact data appears to be mined from the web though they are unclear about the sourcing now that NetProspex no longer provides contacts.  They also offer a set of Community records which were “added or last updated using data that has been shared by InsideView users.”  These contacts are verified by content editors.

The new service puts InsideView directly in competition with Salesforce’s Data.com Clean native offering for ongoing match and append.  Data.com has an advantage in company coverage as it offers the Dun & Bradstreet global WorldBase file.  With respect to contacts, InsideView offers fewer US contacts and emails but a broader set of international contacts.  Neither service supports hygiene features such as email verification, address standardization, phone validation, or duplicate merge / purge (both have duplicate detection during record entry).  Each claims standardization, but that is for records that are being enriched.

Both services also offer sales products (Data.com Prospector and InsideView for CRM), with InsideView having a clear advantage in several key sales intelligence categories (e.g. sales triggers, bios, social media “buzz”, a who knows who tool).  The exception for sales intelligence is with respect to family trees (Dun & Bradstreet linkage is much deeper than Capital IQ linkage in InsideView) and industry content where InsideView offers thin overviews while Data.com now displays First Research industry overviews spanning 1,000 industries.

“When your CRM data is out of date, marketing targets the wrong contacts, accounts are assigned to the wrong territory, and salespeople waste valuable time,” said Jenny Cheng, chief product officer at InsideView. “We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of InsideView Refresh, the best way to update your CRM data to keep your lead-to-revenue operations working effectively.”

Pricing was not disclosed.

Evolution of Sales Intelligence

Darwin's_finchesThe Sales Intelligence (SI) space has been undergoing some rapid change over the past year.  This evolution in functional scope and content sets has resulted in an expansion in the number of companies I cover as well as the categories (ABSD services, PE/VC funding databases).  There is also a movement of sales intelligence vendors into marketing intelligence as the traditional SIs look for additional revenue opportunities and a broader value proposition.

A year ago, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was discussed mostly by DemandBase, a top of the funnel programmatic marketing vendor, but the predictive analytics vendors and Zoominfo began discussing the methodology.  Thus, a year ago, ABM meant anti-ballistic missile or activity based management to all but the most well-versed marketers.  Now the term is commonly found in corporate blogs and collateral and has spawned ABSD (Account Based Software Development) which follows ABM down to the middle of the funnel in the sales development function.  There are now several ABSD vendors which I have begun to include in my newsletter including SalesLoft and QuotaFactory.  ABSD shifts the sales development focus away from “smile and dial” calling towards targeted messaging into a set of top prospects.  Since the prospecting activities are targeting higher value opportunities, there is a benefit to personalizing calls and emails.  SalesLoft refers to this activity as “sincerity at scale.”

What is even more impressive about SalesLoft and QuotaFactory is that they are both less than two years old and yet they have already grown in commercial stature to the point where they are building out partner ecosystems with traditional SIs and other vendors.  SalesLoft rolled out their Sales Development Cloud at their customer conference last month with nine partners including DiscoverOrg, InsideView, Datanyze, and Owler.  At the same time, QuotaFactory announced partnerships with Bedrock Data, Ambition, HG Data, and InsideView.

A second area of rapid growth is the technology sales intelligence vendors.  DiscoverOrg and RainKing have grown revenue and capabilities, transforming what was historically a sleepy niche into a significant sub-category.  Both vendors have posted high multi-year growth rates, internationalized their datasets, expanded their technology trigger events, and developed CRM and marketing automation connectors.  While they continue to gather rich profiles of IT execs, they are broadening their functional coverage to include non-IT functions that are significantly investing in IT cloud solutions such as marketing and finance.  DiscoverOrg is continuing this functional expansion with product management (the recently released TEDD dataset), HR, and Sales.  Furthermore, their databases, which once focused on the Fortune 1000, now cover nearly 50,000 top global companies and 700,000 executives.  Both firms announced significant funding events in the past six months.

Aberdeen Group, which was spun off of Harte-Hanks last year, has begun to invest in the AccessCI database.  Once the leading source of technology profiles and leads, the AccessCI (aka CiTDB and CITDS) dataset had received little investment from Harte-Hanks over the prior decade.  Under new ownership, the product is once again receiving management attention.

The SIs have also increased their coverage of technographics.  Avention acquired SalesQuest two years ago and integrated their Crush profiles into their products while other vendors have licensed vendor/product data from HG Data or mined technographic intelligence.  HG Data has become so adept at collecting vendor/product data that DiscoverOrg and Aberdeen Group have begun licensing content from them.

Several firms that began as fundings databases found that Business Development was a logical extension of their value proposition and have since repositioned themselves as sales intelligence solutions.  Firms such as DataFox and Mattermark are focusing more on sales intelligence functionality while CB Insights has launched a sales intelligence solution (with technographics) while retaining its focus on the PE/VC space.

For the most part, the SIs have avoided the predictive analytics space.  The exceptions are Avention, which supports business signals and ideal profiles, and Radius which morphed  from an SMB SI into a predictive analytics company.  Meanwhile, the predictive analytics companies are beginning to offer a subset of SI features such as net-new leads.

Instead, the SIs have focused more on marketing analytics, data enrichment, and data hygiene which allows them to leverage their databases without investing in data scientists.  Dun & Bradstreet acquired NetProspex last year for its contact database and the Workbench cloud data hygiene platform.  They have also begun to offer Hoover’s concierge services including enrichment, segmentation reporting, and email delivery.  Avention launched its DataVision customer data platform earlier this year while Zoominfo, Data.com, and InsideView have placed equal weight upon marketing services and sales intelligence services.

Social Selling continues to be a core element of positioning for InsideView and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.  Artesian Solutions, a UK vendor that is launching a US product later this year, also focuses on social selling.  A significant product gap across the SIs is the lack of social tools built into their offering.  I can understand why SIs have shied away from Who Knows Who tools (the exceptions are InsideView and DueDil), but it is perplexing why most SI vendors have only limited sets of social media links and little social media content displayed in their services.  Only InsideView, Artesian, and Owler have put much emphasis upon social media content.

Europe is also becoming a home of new services.  DueDil has evolved into a UK challenger to Avention and BvD Mint while IKO System and Sparklane (formerly Zebaz) have an established presence in France.

When I started my newsletter four years ago, many of the companies and products either had not been launched or weren’t on my radar.  I mostly focused on Avention, Hoover’s, InsideView, DiscoverOrg, BvD, Sales Genie, Data.com, and RainKing.  While these companies continue to innovate, much of the energy is coming from new entrants.  The rapid growth and diversity of sales intelligence functionality has been exciting to observe.

Credit: Darwin’s Finches are in the public domain.  Charles Darwin, 1845.

Quota Factory: Sales Development Hub

QF0

Two weeks ago, Quota Factory announced a series of content and platform partnerships to their Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) service.  The new Sales Development Hub partnerships address connectivity, analytics, gamification, prospecting, and data enrichment.

Quota Factory, which was incubated by Salesworks AG, launched its PRM service last September.  Quota Factory is based upon fifteen years of experience refining account based prospecting for Sales Development Reps (SDRs).  “After years of successful sales development operations, we productized our internal know-how into the most user-friendly and impactful B2B prospecting platform available today,” said Quota Factory CEO Peter Gracey. “With one platform for data, outbound messaging, call planning, reporting and automation, SDRs can now ditch the eight different logins for all the solutions they’re currently using and free up their time to do what they were hired to do – speak live with prospects.”

Quota Factory helps firms define an ideal customer profile and develops a phone and email database of targeted prospects.  Tools include automated dialing, messaging templates, pre-built call planning, and daily objectives.  The service also supports “rigorous rules around qualification criteria, ensuring that each rep fully qualifies and passes as many targeted prospects as possible through meaningful conversations.”

Gracey emphasized that the firm is self-financed.  “We aren’t a venture backed firm and we are proud of that.  We built our product with the profits made from our outsourcing business. Basically, we earned the right to build the best Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) platform by being phenomenal at…wait for it…sales development! No smoke and mirrors here. If it finds it’s way into QuotaFactory, you can bet the family dog it’s been vetted by actual SDRs first.”

Quota Factory announced new or expanded partnerships with

  • Bedrock Data: Data management and API connectivity
  • Ambition: Sales analytics and gamification tools
  • InsideView: Account and contact prospecting, data enrichment, and account intelligence (expanded)
  • HG Data: Technology vendors and products

Quota Factory worked with Bedrock Data to build its Sales Development Hub.  Bedrock offers a data management platform which provides broad API connections.  Bedrock Data helps firms “synchronize and manage” data across multiple data APIs.  Quota Factory chose to work with a partner instead of building their own data store because “integrations are a tricky business. Companies can either choose to build each one individually on their own, or they can seek out an expert to do it for them. We fall into the latter category,” said Gracey. “Why learn on the job (and run the risk of hurting your customers as a result) when you can partner with a firm that does what you need for a living?”

“Empowering companies to get the most out of their business systems has always been our goal, said Bedrock CEO John Marcus.  “By connecting QuotaFactory users to multiple prospecting data sources of their choice – through the Bedrock Data platform – sales professionals will gain an unfair advantage by having real-time access to critical sales and marketing data.”

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Ambition’s Account Dashboard is “baked” into Quota Factory

The second partnership is with gamification and sales analytics platform Ambition which OEM’d its platform to Quota Factory.  The integration provides account and management dashboards, challenge dashboards for contests, benchmarking reports, and custom reporting.

Gamification tools include “both SPIF-style challenges and ‘Fantasy Football’ style team competitions,” said Gracey.  Contests can be built on the fly using “any metric, role, or timeframe.”  Ambition then provides real-time contest tracking and shares the results with the team.

Quota Factory tested Ambition before licensing the service, providing it to their sales development reps and managers for feedback.   “As part of any pre-partnership due diligence, we had to check out the software for ourselves first,” said Gracey.  “Our internal team of SDRs love it, our managers can’t live without it, and as a result, our customers now get to use it.  In fact, we were so impressed with the functionality, versatility, and impact that it had on our business, we gave it some prime real estate in our platform.”

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InsideView supports company and contact enrichment with duplicate checking within Quota Factory.

InsideView is an existing partner, but Quota Factory expanded their license to support account and contact prospecting, data enrichment, and account research.  Previously, account and contact actions were limited to single records managed by the SDR.

Gracey praised the flexibility of InsideView’s API for prospecting, account research, and data enrichment.  Account and contact records can be enriched en masse or individually.  When managed in bulk, the records can be cleansed (overwritten with InsideView values) or appended (enrich only null fields).

T0 promote the partnership, Quota Factory is including 10,000 free record enrichments to new and existing PRM customers.

Account information includes firmographics, recent news, and contacts.

HG Data is providing technology vendor and product data for companies.  As with their other partners, Quota Factory vetted the partner through their own SDRs.

“Knowing the incumbent landscape you are entering before you even pick up the phone is pure gold for an SDR,” observed Gracey.  “This is especially the case now that account based sales development (ABSD) is rising in prevalence and demanding a more focused and customized approach to prospecting. Focused prospect messaging driven by competitive intel builds confidence, promotes pre-call research, and drives quality conversation rates northward.”