Tag: Intent Data

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q1 Release


LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out its Q1 product, focusing on relationships, personas, and enhanced buyer intent functionality.

The new Relationship Explorer surfaces “hidden allies” and best paths into accounts, helping sales reps avoid cold outreach and “spam cannon techniques.”

“Instead of a blanket approach where you target everyone at an account, you can laser in on the people who are most likely to take a meeting with you based on their persona and what connection they have to you,” explained LinkedIn Senior Director of Product Mitali Pattnaik.  “You can also use it to multi-thread deeper into accounts by finding the next-best person to reach out to.  This creates a more efficient experience for buyers and sellers alike.”

Sales Navigator has long supported introductions and TeamLink (colleague) suggestions, but it has never fully leveraged the value of its economic graph for warm communications.  The Economic Graph supports 900-million-member profiles across 61 million companies, along with current and prior employment, educational background, posts, etc.

Sales Navigator has a second advantage: its profiles are maintained by its members, ensuring that profiles are kept up to date and contain rich data around education, interests, skills, employment history, etc.

“Teams have relied so heavily on cold outreach largely because they’re leveraging sales intelligence tools that are limited in showing how to get a foot in the door of an account.  These tools are chock-full of stale data: everything from incorrect contact info to the wrong person in the wrong role.  With reliance on tools full of stale data, reps end up spamming all potential prospects with a spray-and-pray strategy, leading to an abysmal 1-2% response rate,” argued Pattnaik.  “Looking forward, sellers are going to need to be smarter and reach out with a more personalized approach.”

Relationship Explorer recommends prospects at an account, leveraging the interactions and trends across its professional network “to provide sellers with optimal paths to connect with their target personas at their target accounts.”  As a result, Relationship Explorer saves time prospecting, cross-selling, and upselling at accounts, helping reps find the best contacts at target accounts.

The feature offers up to eight “of the most relevant individuals” based on their target persona and relevant, actionable insights (called spotlights by LinkedIn) based on interactions between members and organizations.  Spotlights highlight both biographic and dynamic information, including recent job changes, LinkedIn postings, and past customers.  As such, they provide timely reasons to reach out and content to include in their outreach.

Relationship Explorer suggests the best contact at an account based on the user-defined persona.

Relationship Explorer is available in all Sales Navigator editions.  However, while it displays a dozen spotlights, not all are available in each edition.  For example, Past Customer spotlights are only available in the Advanced Plus edition.

Personas help users identify their target audience by function, seniority level, geography, and current job title.  They are available on the Homepage, Search, Relationship Explorer, and Account pages.

Users can define up to five personas which act as templates for homing in on ideal prospects.

Persona definitions on the homepage.

Pattnaik suggested several use cases for personas:

  • Creating highly targeted Personas matching target customer profiles.
  • Leveraging Personas in Search, Homepage, or Account Pages to identify the most relevant opportunities.
  • Identifying warm paths and decision-makers at targeted accounts with Relationship Explorer.
  • Using insights from Account Pages, including Persona growth, to prioritize accounts composed of leads matching Personas.

Persona functionality is available to all users.

Over the past few releases, Sales Navigator has built buyer intent into its service.  Its latest intent-based feature is Product Category Buyer Intent, which identifies buyers searching for products in their category.

Product Intent Categories

Previous Sales Navigator intent was based upon research into a vendor.  Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category but may not know a vendor or its offerings.  The two types of intent data can be compared to understand the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.

“Categories are created with AI by combining related keywords into one central category, which is then tied to products using publicly facing product descriptions.  For example, “fintech” and “financial tech” are individual keywords, which the AI model can combine into a single category,” explained Pattnaik.  “Intent is then connected using buyer’s members’ profile as well as recent buying activities on LinkedIn.com to help sellers find the buyers who are likely looking for a solution like theirs.”

LinkedIn is rolling out several new Buyer Activities that will be displayed on Account Pages and the Buyer Intent Account Dashboard.  Additional intent categories are rolling out over the next quarter:

  • LinkedIn Ad Engagement: Clicks and view activity data.  Both of these data points are private, so sellers will only be able to see the general profile of the buyer.
  • InMail Acceptance for a colleague: Displays the public identity of individuals who have accepted InMails from other sellers on the same contract.
  • Company LinkedIn page visits: Clicks on the company page.  Page visits are a private activity, so the buyer is anonymous.
  • LinkedIn profile visits to colleagues and leadership: A new activity that shows sellers when a potential buyer visits the profile of a colleague on the same contract or company leadership.  This is also a private activity.

Buyer Intent is available in the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions of Sales Navigator.

Users can now search against any account list or use an account list as a suppression list.  Other new search filters include:

  • Past Customer (Advanced Plus only)
  • Past Colleague
  • Executive TeamLink – leverages the networks of a company’s executives (Advanced and Advanced Plus only).
  • Viewed Your Profile
  • Product Category Buyer Intent

LinkedIn also enhanced its Sales Insights (LSI) service with the improved matching of companies to CRM accounts and Adjustable Growth Time ranges.

LinkedIn admitted that its previous LSI matching logic may have been inaccurate as it only matched against a few standard CRM fields.  LSI now supports CRM custom ingestion that improves match rates with customer-defined match fields.  There is also an option to force matches based on LinkedIn Ids or URLs.

LinkedIn Sales Insights Field Mapping

Adjustable Growth Time Ranges can be set to 3, 6, 12, and 24-month increments.

Engagement Data Is Becoming Integral to SalesTech

Chorus Momentum identifies deal risks.

One of the most important SalesTech trends, besides the emergence of ChatGPT, is the rapid incorporation of engagement datasets alongside intent datasets for prioritization and messaging.

A few years ago, we saw the emergence of intent data sets such as first-party web visitor tracking, second-party product review site research, and third-party B2B media research.  Initially, this content was integrated into MAPs, ABX platforms, and CDPs, but it was not well integrated into SalesTech.  We are now seeing intent data being integrated into SalesTech platforms in a simplified fashion (e.g., High Intent Topics in CRM profiles and Slack alerts) that is digestible for sales reps. 

However, intent data only indicates whether a company is in-market, not whether the buying committee is considering your offering or seriously engaged with your sales team.  This intelligence comes from a new category of engagement data captured from digital interactions between the revenue team (sales, marketing, and customer success) and the buying committee.  Engagement intelligence consists of both traditional digital interactions (e.g., clickthroughs, downloads) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics derived from sales and buying team activities.

NLP helps RevTech platforms determine who is interacting with your firm.  It also analyzes buyer sentiment, buyer concerns, deal health, and risk flags.  The primary sources of engagement data are emails, recorded phone calls, and recorded meetings.  However, any digital interaction between buyers and sellers can be captured such as activity in digital sales rooms, webinar attendance, chat messaging, and scheduled meetings.  I anticipate that customer support platforms will also be tapped for engagement data to help gauge churn risk and friction during product trials.

Engagement data indicates whether a deal is on track and what issues could result in lost deals or pushed out pipeline.  For example, engagement data assesses whether:

  • Discussions are single or multi-threaded
  • Key decisionmakers are involved (e.g., has a security review been performed or has legal been included?)
  • Competitors have been mentioned
  • Pricing concerns were raised
  • Follow on meetings have been scheduled
  • Meetings had a positive flow or were dominated by the sales rep

In short, engagement data provides sales reps and managers deal health and risk analytics that improve forecasting and ensure that deal risks are quickly mitigated.  And as interactions are digital, managers can discuss these issues during one-on-ones or offer quick tips on next steps.  They can even review the discussion associated with the risk and identify skills and knowledge gaps for coaching.

Nektar’s Insights Hub details buyer-seller interactions, leading indicators, buying committee engagement, MEDDIC adherence, etc.

The interesting thing about intent and engagement data is they are highly complementary with each other.  Operations teams should be looking at integrating intent data alongside engagement data.  Intent data is valuable for identifying who and when to reach out to ideal customers.  However, once a relationship is established, the focus shifts to engagement data for monitoring deal health.  After a deal is signed, both engagement and intent data are in play.  Intent data identifies cross-sell opportunities and churn risk through second and third-party intent topic monitoring while Engagement and Product Usage data evaluate adoption rates and potential implementation issues.

Engagement data and deal health analytics can be found in Revenue Intelligence services (e.g., Clari, Revenue Grid), Sales Engagement (e.g., Salesloft, Outreach, Groove), Conversational Sales (e.g., Gong, Chorus), Revenue Operations (Nektar), and Sales Enablement (e.g., Seismic, Bigtincan) platforms.

Revenue Grid Deal Guidance

Demandbase Standalone Intent

Both services provide keyword intent, with Standalone Intent delivered to third-party platforms. (Source: Demandbase)

ABX Platform Demandbase, which also offers a data cloud and sales intelligence solution, rolled out its keyword intent dataset for third-party platforms.  Demandbase Intent is available both inside the Demandbase One platform (embedded) and delivered to other platforms (standalone).  Demandbase Intent joins Demandbase’s other Data Cloud assets, including firmographics, technographics, and contacts.

Standalone Intent, which supports 375,000 keywords and ingests 18 billion daily signals, provides buying signals for predictive models, data stores, and analytics.  Data is delivered via API, cloud delivery, or CSV flat files.

New keywords are added weekly, with historical intent maintained for twelve months.

Demandbase Intent helps marketing teams target in-market accounts and refine their messaging.  Furthermore, Demandbase Intent can trigger campaigns, avoid churn, and expand accounts.

“Our intent takes multiple sources into account, providing a much stronger and more accurate signals than others in the space,” said Demandbase VP of Product and Industry Marketing Jackie Palmer.  “By using Demandbase Intent, data scientists, corporate strategists, and sales and marketing analytics professionals can build and improve their predictive models, helping them to better understand buyers’ goals and navigate the anonymous buying journey.  As they identify patterns, trends, and opportunities, they can be more precise in prioritizing accounts and gaining deeper insight into their revenue potential.”

Demandbase claims that its keyword library provides superior targeting compared to taxonomically-based intent datasets, allowing vendors to target niche industries and segments, track competitor offerings, and dovetail on partners’ intent.  Furthermore, customers can add new keywords “to fit their needs, whereas other intent providers limit customers to a finite, predefined list of topics.”  They can then feed keyword intent to their data lakes, data warehouses, or business intelligence platforms, making the intent data available to data scientists for propensity-to-buy models.

Palmer told data scientists, “What you can do is build your…propensity-to-buy models, all the different things you need for predictive analytics around your account intent activities.  You can stream that directly into your CRM systems, marketing automation systems, or any go-to-market systems that you need to.”

Demandbase Intent can be used alongside other intent datasets.  Demandbase One also supports Bombora’s third-party intent, G2 second-party technology research intent, website visitor intelligence, and other datasets licensed by its Demandbase customers.

“Our mantra is the more intent data, the better,” Palmer explained to GZ Consulting.  “So, that’s why within the platform, we always integrate with Bombora, G2, etc.  But this is now for standalone people that may not want the Demandbase platform but also want to add additional concepts of intent into their data lakes [and] data warehouses.”

Furthermore, keyword intent is “totally complementary” to taxonomic intent data sources.

The Demandbase AI assesses keyword usage and the age of the article (older articles provide higher relevance), related articles the user has read, and “rare and hyper-qualifying keywords and themes to identify personas and buying committee roles.”

“We track the relevant articles,” explained Demandbase Data Cloud Product Marketer Imran Ahmed to GZ Consulting.  “If you want to look at how the market does it, they do it through co-ops.  They do it through metatags.  We’re doing it through articles that help us identify not only the keywords but help us gather all the users looking at those keywords across the web.  That brings up signal relevance and helps us get more granular and more exposure.”

Demandbase Intent does not look at Google search terms but looks a layer deeper at which articles are being viewed.

“Demandbase intent data is based on years of AI research and delivers more breadth and relevance than any you’ll find anywhere else.  Why?  Because we own the technology to identify anonymous accounts and pair that with our direct access to the bidstream — the source for the most intent signals.  Then we beef up the relevance of those signals using a combination of AI and natural language processing.”

Standalone intent is priced per keyword.

Standalone intent has been generally available since December and already has several clients.  However, due to the calendar, the firm held off on announcing the service until late January.

Demandbase Intent by the Numbers (Source: Demandbase)

Resources

Bombora B2B Research Trends

Intent data vendor Bombora analyzed its topical data to gauge economic concerns and how they may play out across B2B research.  While economic growth is up 60%, economic downturn is up 119% year-over-year, and market volatility has spiked 149%. Likewise, layoffs (109%) are far outpacing hiring (42%).

“In general, what we’re seeing is a shift in focus from business growth to business resiliency.  In fact, July 2022 actually marked the first time we’ve seen the volume of searches for resiliency surpass those for growth,” blogged Hsiaolei Miller, Bombora VP Insights & Partner Success.  “So, instead of focusing on advertising and launching new products, B2B businesses have been investing more of their time and energy into understanding how to maintain their current business through retaining their customers, encouraging renewals, and other strategies.”

Business Resilience topics are surging (Source: Bombora Market Insights)

Thus, Brand and Demand is the primary focus of businesses, with searching on customer expansion and RevOps becoming more important.  Last year, growth-oriented topics outpaced more “maintenance-focused” topics.  However, these topics have achieved rough parity.

Moreover, research in Brand and Demand topics has shifted towards inbound efforts and away from outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing research is growing and outbound is in decline Business Resilience topics are surging
(Source: Bombora Market Insights).

“With cost pressures mounting, businesses need to focus on extracting as much value and engagement possible from the customers in their pipeline vs. going through the process to find net-new customers,” argued Miller.  “Businesses still want new business, but they want to be more efficiently capturing and capitalizing on every lead that comes into the pipeline.  This can be seen in the increased research into retargeting and conversational marketing strategies and the increase in interest in general inbound marketing software.”

Bombora also found increases in research related to customer expansion (upsell, cross-sell) and time to value.

“Customer expansion involves creating more value for your business by selling your existing customers more of your product or service.  Customer TTV is the time it takes until the ‘Aha!  moment’ when a customer realizes the expected value of your product,” stated Miller.  “Businesses are looking to accomplish both of these goals through investments in customer support automation vs. traditional customer support, which aims to maximize efficiency while also lowering overall customer support costs.”

On Salesforce’s earnings call this month, co-CEO Bret Taylor argued that executives are focusing on time to value and digital transformation benefits (e.g., cost savings, customer satisfaction, and top-line growth) when evaluating digital investments.

Ross Graber, Principal Analyst at Forrester, came to a similar conclusion in his 2023 B2B predictions.  “In light of economic uncertainty, B2B organizations will strive to grow in the places they know and the places they understand.  As a result, B2B growth strategies will tilt heavily toward retention, cross-sell, and upsell revenues.  Growing revenues within the existing customer base requires not only great products and services, but strong customer relationships.”

Sales and Operations Planning had the biggest jump in topical research in Q3, up 386% year-over-year.  RevOps looks to align sales, marketing, and customer success across the customer lifecycle.  RevOps looks to address questions such as how do we get and keep customers?

“During times of uncertainty, businesses are less focused on casting wide nets for new customers and taking big risks, and more focused on squeezing the value out of the customers they already have in their pipeline,” stated Miller.

Resources

Clearbit Partners with G2

Clearbit leverages first and second-party intent data for building and activating audiences.

B2B data vendor Clearbit is the latest firm to announce a partnership with G2 to deliver G2’s second-party technology intent data.  The G2 feed will be available alongside Clearbit’s firmographics, contacts, and Reveal visitor intelligence.

“For any company that shows up in your defined Audiences, Capture automatically creates new accounts and key contacts (from our database of marketable and verified contacts) directly in Salesforce,” blogged Clearbit CMO Kevin Tate.  “This way, your marketing and sales teams can focus on engaging the right people, based on role and title, from the companies you care about.”

Clearbit offers B2B data enrichment, audience building, visitor intelligence, and web forms to over 1,500 customers, including Segment (Twilio), Intercom, HubSpot, Asana, and Atlassian.  Clearbit’s reference database gathers insights on 44 million companies and 350 million contacts.

“Marketers know that engaging the right companies at the right time is key, but with increased pressure to build high-quality pipeline, it’s never been more critical.  With G2 and Clearbit, teams can now leverage the powerful combination of company fit and buyer intent to focus their funnel – and even use Clearbit Capture to discover key buyers and contacts at their best-fit, high-intent prospects.”

Clearbit CTO Harlow Ward

G2 Buyer Intent Signals include

  • Companies viewing G2 Product Profiles and Sponsored Content
  • Companies viewing G2 Categories, Comparison Products, and Alternative & Competitor Pages
  • G2 Buyer Intent Scores for every visiting company

“Buyer intent data is a secret weapon for leading B2B marketers,” said Christine Li, VP of Growth & Enablement at G2.  “Clearbit’s integration with G2 helps marketers take that data even further — driving more streamlined actions for sales, intent-based revenue, and realizing the full potential of account-based marketing.”

The combined first and second-party intent datasets help identify the optimal time to reach out to customers and prospects.  By integrating intent data with a firm’s ICP, marketing can determine which ideal customers are in-market.

As G2 also identifies accounts that are viewing alternatives or running product comparisons, it assists with identifying competitive threats at current customers.  Risk flags allow Account Executives and Customer Success Managers to reach out proactively to wobbly renewals and reduce churn risk. 

Clearbit Audience and Capture leverages first and second-party attendance.

Clearbit Audience and Capture combine first and second-party intelligence for building and activating campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google.  Admins can also set up automated Slack alerts when intent scores are met, helping ensure that sales reps focus on target accounts while they are in-market.

“Our focus is on helping you put our Clearbit + G2 audiences to work across your existing stack and apps (with our flexible integrations & webhooks),” remarked Tate to GZ Consulting.  “It’ll be interesting to see how these changes in the economy continue to affect how companies spend on MarTech – but we’re seeing more companies currently looking for flexible solutions to ‘upgrade the stack they already have’ vs. ‘rip-and-replace with a walled-garden suite.’”

Demandbase CRM Connectors

Demandbase sales and marketing engagement data can be visually displayed in Dynamics 365.

Demandbase unveiled a pair of CRM connectors for HubSpot and MSD 365.  The bi-directional, native integrations allow Demandbase One to push data into the CRMs for automated workflows, Lead-to-Account mapping, tracking, and responding to engagement activity.  Syncing is performed nightly.

“This release creates a unified interface that empowers revenue operations, sales, and marketing teams to grow predictable pipeline and close larger deals,” blogged Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier.  “The integrations enable a variety of rich workflows for customers to enhance their analytics, derive valuable insights, target more efficiently, and build reporting that aligns with their own CRM data set and their GTM needs.”

Demandbase launched the unified first and third-party view in its Salesforce connector this summer and has now expanded it to two other leading CRMs.

Demandbase offers a set of Calculated Fields that includes intent, engagement, and predictive scores that are synced and displayed in CRMs.

Demandbase feeds intent and engagement data, firmographics, technographics, and Demandbase Calculated Fields into CRMs.  With this data, operations can create CRM custom sales views, reports, and dashboards that display website activity, intent, and heatmaps.  Sales reps can view both sales intelligence and engagement data from a unified view. 

Furthermore, CRM data is available for list building and filtering in Demandbase One.  Users can define selectors, set up orchestration, create Demandbase campaigns, visualize and apply Demandbase intent and predictive scores, analyze journeys, and build reports.  Furthermore, “accurate account identification, combined with their CRM data, also means better predictive models, marketing and sales alerts, personalization opportunities, and more.”

For example, past opportunity data from the CRMs are now available to Demandbase pipeline predict and qualification scoring models to assist with account prioritization.  Demandbase also helps, “align messaging to each stage” of the buyer’s journey and assists with list building and campaign execution.

Conversely, Demandbase is syncing its insights (e.g., intent data, web traffic, most engaged contacts) with the CRM, helping reps prioritize accounts and prepare for account interactions.  Insights include Demandbase’s configurable data, such as its scores and engagement minutes that populate custom fields.

Demandbase brought firmographic, contact, and technographics databases in-house following the May 2021 acquisitions of InsideView (firmographics, contacts, and event triggers) and DemandMatrix (technographics).  Intent data includes first and third-party intelligence such as Surging Intent, Demandbase Keyword Intent, Campaign Responses, and Web Page Visits.

Revenue Operations can also select intent data from Bombora and G2, which are processed through the ABX platform’s predictive models.

“Both of these integrations improve orchestration, delivering greater sales and marketing alignment and a friction-free experience,” stated Demandbase.

“These integrations ensure our customers who use Dynamics 365 and HubSpot CRM realize the full value of the Demandbase platform.  Pairing Demandbase natively with the CRM allows our customers to orchestrate a seamless go-to-market motion with full alignment between marketing and sales.  We’re providing the full power of our Account Intelligence in these connected systems and saving sales and marketing teams time by providing them actionable insights wherever they want to consume them.  The result is better performance with less manual effort at every stage of the customer journey.”

Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw

Demandbase is not done with the connectors.  It plans to add additional functionality to the CRMs, including “new sales-focused experiences, additional capabilities in the Demandbase app in Dynamics, enhanced Lead-To-Account functionality, and the ability to automate and scale account-based / people-based plays directly from your activities.”

Demandbase supports both HubSpot CRM and Marketing Automation platforms.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q4 Release

LinkedIn Sales Navigator unveiled its Q4 release this month with new account and relationship intelligence lists, improvements to buyer intent, refined searching, expanded revenue and technology data, and a more streamlined ability to upload a sales rep’s book of business.

The new My Current Accounts homepage prompt lets sales reps load their book of business as a CSV list matched against LinkedIn company profiles.  In addition, LinkedIn offers a quick field mapper to ensure the CSV is properly ingested and matched to the correct LinkedIn company profiles.

Account Lists provide several benefits to sales reps.  Sales Navigator users can

  • Target in-market accounts based on LinkedIn Buyer Intent
  • Review real-time alerts around sales triggers such as funding events, leadership changes, and headcount growth/decline
  • Streamline search and prospecting efforts by spotlighting specific saved searches based a user’s book of business

“Yes, it’s great on its own,” blogged LinkedIn Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray.  “But it reaches a whole new level of capability when you can manage your entire book of business in Sales Navigator – insights surfaced via features like Buyer Intent are more actionable, searching becomes more powerful, and it’s that much easier to stay on top of what’s happening at your most important accounts.”

LinkedIn already aggregated Buyer Intent scores spanning 180 different intent signals, and it added four isolated visible Buyer Intent activities as part of an early beta in Q3.  LinkedIn plans to release additional Buyer Intent activities in future releases.  These specific activities are displayed with the associated account.  Furthermore, when the intent activity is public-facing, the individual completing the activity is also presented to the sales rep.

The four isolated Buyer Intent activities are

  1. Who’s followed a company
  2. Who’s visited your profile
  3. Who’s a new connection to yourself
  4. Who’s filled out a lead gen form
Reps can view LinkedIn buyer intent against their account list and then target accounts with high intent levels.

LinkedIn contends that its intent insights differ from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence.  Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account.  Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”

Sales Navigator said that it will offer a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement.”

Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.

Current Account Lists and Buyer Intent are available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.

Buyer Activities capture account and contact-level intent.

LinkedIn did not expand the Buyer Intent categories in Q4 but added two new features: Filtering for Buyer Activities and new Buyer Intent account hover cards.  On Account Pages, sales reps can filter for activities by time range and level of decision-making ability.

Reps can also hover over accounts on Alerts, Lists, and Lead Pages to better evaluate an opportunity and refine account messaging.  The hover popup displays the level of buyer interest, recent news, and decision-makers changes “so sellers can easily double check any account’s level of intent as the work through Sales Navigator, without disrupting the current workflow.”

Hover cards provide account intelligence without disrupting research flow.

The New Executives at Saved Accounts List is an auto-generated list based on the saved accounts list.  The list identifies VP and CxO executives hired by tracked accounts.  While the executive view restricts the report to top-level executives, it doesn’t yet support filtering by function, a valuable report extension.

I’ve long extolled the value of identifying new executives at companies.  Fortunately, sales intelligence solutions are doing a better job of leveraging executive change insights in their products:

  • D&B Hoovers supports exec change alerts and triggers by job function.
  • ZoomInfo offers executive tracking of champions to new companies along with backfill contact recommendations at their old employer.
  • LinkedIn identifies new execs at saved accounts.

“We’ve found a lot of success internally being able to see when a new executive comes in,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions Head of Product Marketing Neil Khare explained to GZ Consulting during a briefing.  “They’re generally more willing to think about new vendors or have a mandate to change things up a little bit.  It’s a great time to capitalize on it, and we find that we’ve had some success internally on it, so we wanted to bring this up externally as well.”

LinkedIn also released a Recently Accepted Connections and InMails List highlighting individuals who responded to connection requests or InMails over the past thirty days.

The lists are available online from the list tab or via a weekly email digest.

“These are people that you are going to want to follow up with,” stated Khare.

Users can access two updated filters when building lists: Technology Used and Revenue.  Both filters have been improved with new data licensing agreements from undisclosed data partners. 

Accounts may be filtered by preset revenue ranges (vs. discrete values determined by the end-user).  All revenue data is in US Dollars.

To improve regional screening, users can paste a set of postal codes.

LinkedIn Sales Insights, LinkedIn’s DaaS enrichment service for sales ops, also benefited from expanded revenue data sourced from LinkedIn members, third-party vendors, and AI models.  95% of Fortune 500 and 75% of publicly traded companies display discrete revenue data.  More broadly, 60% of companies have at least a modeled revenue range.

To improve the Sales Insights workflow, LSI added exclusion filters for companies and personas, helping Sales Operations “focus on industries and geographies that are relevant to your business.”

LinkedIn Sales Insights now offers exclusion criteria to improve reporting filters.

TechTarget Much Better Positioned to Withstand Recession than in 2008

Technology Sales and Marketing Services vendor TechTarget ($TTGT) believes it is in a much stronger marketplace and revenue position than in 2008, the last recession not caused by a pandemic. It has shifted away from economically sensitive brand revenues to a “robust product suite, which allows us to address the evolving needs of our customers.”  As a result, brand revenues have declined from 30% of total revenue to 10% since 2009.

TechTarget is fundamentally much stronger than in 2008.  It has trebled its revenue over the past fourteen years and doubled its Adjusted EBITDA margin.  In 2009, the firm had virtually no long-term contracts; now, 42% of revenue is associated with longer-term contracts.  Other positive signs: TechTarget has grown its customer base from 1,000 to 3,200 customers and is much less reliant on legacy global customers, reducing its revenue share from 32% to 20%.  Furthermore, its largest customers have shifted from hardware to cloud and software vendors with subscription customers.  Whereas its top customers in 2009 suffered revenue downturns, its current customer base is more likely to struggle to grow revenue than to suffer declining revenue.

“The modernization of the sales and marketing organization is a strong and durable trend.  It is hard to compete in today’s IT market without a data-driven go-to-market strategy,” argued CEO Michael Cotoia on TechTarget’s Q3 earnings call earlier this month.  “As the leading provider of first-party purchase intent data in the enterprise IT market, we will continue to benefit from this trend.”

Priority Engine

Priority Engine, its subscription sales intelligence platform, grew revenues by 15% last quarter.  TechTarget will continue to invest in Priority Engine after doubling the number of engineers working on the product in 2022.

In 2023, Priority Engine will further bolster its Salesforce integration with “bi-directional data flow, campaign orchestration from within Priority Engine, additional program impact reporting, market insights to inform marketing and sales outreach, and alert-driven account and prospect intelligence for our sales users.”

Priority Engine also plans to ingest Salesforce data for analytics dashboards around ROI, open pipeline, and won/lost opportunities.   The dashboards will answer the question, “how do we set up our sales reps within our customers’ environment to make the most appropriate and relevant follow-up?”

“We also want to make sure that we are working with our customers to provide more insights across their total campaign with TechTarget, both on the sales side and on the marketing side.  So, what you’re doing with their lead generation and demand gen, their content, their branding, the visitors on their website to really bring that end-to-end view into Priority Engine to help fuel and help modernize…both sales and marketing.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

The firm sees significant opportunity for growth in TechTarget’s sales-specific module, which is still in the early adoption phase as it was rolled out less than a year ago.

TechTarget does not break out the number of customers licensing Priority Engine or the Priority Engine sales module.  However, CFO Daniel Noreck said that the module is “growing nicely but still a small base.”

More broadly, the firm has 3,200 customers, but there are over 18,000 global technology companies with at least $50 million in annual revenue, providing plenty of market opportunity. 

“We believe most of those companies are good candidates for the Priority Engine sales module,” stated Cotoia.  “While we expect that our rollout to those customers will be slowed by macroeconomic weakness in the short term, we think the long-term opportunity is enormous.”

Content to Close

TechTarget’s fastest-growing service is Content Enablement which powers its Content to Close strategy.  In conjunction with its customers, TechTarget produced content “to fuel their marketing and sales outreach.”  The service is aligned with the growing focus on self-service research among younger purchasing and business professionals.

“Most technology companies’ current go-to-market strategy is very sales rep heavy. We believe this approach is going to need to transform in the coming years to adjust to the changing buyer dynamics.  The companies that win business will have a comprehensive content strategy to effectively influence buyers before their sales reps get involved.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

The acquisitions of Enterprise Strategy Group (“ESG”) and BrightTALK have “uniquely positioned” TechTarget to support growing self-service requirements.  Content Enablement via these subsidiaries will continue to be an “aggressive” investment area.

TechTarget also believes it has a market advantage due to its opted-in, privacy-compliant intent data sets gathered from its B2B media websites and BrightTALK.  Cotoia argues that customer sensitivity to privacy issues and growing government regulations will offer an ongoing competitive advantage for its intent data from permission-based audiences owned and operated by TechTarget.  This advantage “will become even more apparent when Google eliminates third-party cookies.”

TechTarget will continue to look for acquisitions like BrightTALK and ESG that expand the firm’s product capabilities.  It is also interested in acquiring vertical media companies like Xtelligent Healthcare that expand the firm’s TAM into verticals that share similar attributes as Enterprise IT: significant purchase price, complex buying process, long lead times, and large buyer teams.

Healthcare Intent

TechTarget recently integrated XTelligent Healthcare intent into Priority Engine, creating a sales intelligence solution for HealthTech and Healthcare.

Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.

Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies.  TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered.  Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”

To demonstrate confidence in the company, TechTarget began a new stock buyback program to repurchase up to $200 million in common stock and convertible debt over the next two years.

TechTarget: Priority Engine for Healthcare

Priority Engine for Healthcare offers topical intent for 400K registered healthcare administrators, IT professionals, and clinicians.

TechTarget, a leader in second-party technology intent data sets for sales and marketing, expanded the scope of its Priority Engine service to support the US healthcare sector.  The new Priority Engine for Healthcare service provides prospect-level intent gathered from Xtelligent Healthcare Media, its August 2021 acquisition.

“Being able to provide our customers with 1st-party intent data on the largest healthcare technology and information audience on the web is a true game changer in our industry,” said Sean Brooks, Co-Founder of Xtelligent Healthcare Media.  “Sales and marketing teams will now have direct access to entire healthcare buying teams, including Clinicians, Line of Business, and IT Decision-Makers, to find more opportunities and accelerate technology deals.”

Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.

Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies.  TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered.  Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”

The service is available for ten segments:

  1. Analytics
  2. Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR)
  3. Healthcare Security & Compliance
  4. Health IT Infrastructure
  5. Life Sciences
  6. Patient Engagement
  7. Payer
  8. Pharma
  9. Revenue Cycle Management
  10. Telehealth

Intent data is gathered from 14 B2B healthcare media properties.  HealthTech sites include EHR Intelligence, Health IT Security, and Health IT Analytics.  Clinical research and medical sites include LifeSciences Intelligence, PharmaNews Intelligence, and HealthPayer Intelligence.  Over 400 healthcare topics are covered, with roughly half focused on Healthcare Tech.

Priority Engine for Healthcare also offers visitor intelligence and content view tracking.  Healthcare intent data from BrightTALK, TechTarget’s digital webinar and event platform, is also included.

Xtelligent, also based in Boston, has a similar content model to TechTarget.  When acquired last year, it had over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites, but lacked a platform for enabling its contacts and intent datasets. 

Xtelligent content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market.  Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.

The new intent topics identify HealthTech content consumption at the account and prospect levels, gathered from TechTarget’s 150 enterprise and health technology websites.

“By expanding the amount of permission-based, relevant 1st-party purchase intent data our customers have access to and delivering a full suite of marketing, sales, and go-to-market services to engage real buyers, we help companies of all sizes achieve better results at scale in this market,” said Michael Cotoia, CEO, TechTarget.  “As a leader in coverage of B2B enterprise tech for more than 20 years – combined with working very closely with our almost 3,000 customers – TechTarget has unique visibility into the buying dynamics across every major sector of the market.  Our experience positions us well to bring our model to adjacent vertical markets with similar attributes to enterprise B2B tech – long/complex-sales cycles, large purchases, multiple members of the buying team, and a strong need for 1st party data to enable marketers and sellers – just as we have done in healthcare.”

Priority Engine for Healthcare Prospect Insights

Company Links: TechTarget | Xtelligent | Priority Engine