TechTarget released the latest update to Priority Engine, with expanded sales intelligence insights, workflows, and data syncing. Enhancements support greater Salesforce functionality and additional Prospect-Level Intent use cases. Prospect-level intent is generated from GDPR-compliant activity across its network of 150 enterprise technology media sites and over 1,000 topical video channels.
“To serve the more than 30 million opted-in members (your buyers) across our information networks and keep them coming back, we have to stay on top of their rapidly evolving information needs,” blogged CMO John Steinert. “We need to anticipate where categories and organizations are going and be there for our members. And that means, for our tech vendor clients, we can be the best possible source of insights into what’s happening in their hyper-specific categories, for both strategic and tactical – lead gen or otherwise — purposes. We help them turn our audiences (represent their markets) into more demand, better leads, and healthier opportunity pipelines.”
Furthermore, Prospect-Level Intent improves both sales and marketing performance. For example, email nurture campaigns that target active buyers and prospect interests “commonly result in dramatically higher CTRs vs. cold contact outreach.”
Likewise, outbound sales activity targeting active prospects with demonstrated intent enjoy “significantly higher” call conversion rate.
A TechTarget analysis of over 350,000 opportunities across 90,000 accounts found that TechTarget-influenced deals progressed to closed/won status 35% faster than other opportunities.
“When B2B tech buyers need to solve business problems, they come to TechTarget first because we provide both the independent decision-support editorial content they respect and the vendor content they seek in a context that caters to their buying ‘jobs-to-be-done.’ Priority Engine provides our clients with deep insight into these buying team and buyer’s journey interactions so they can better capitalize on real demand taking shape in their markets. This release gets this proprietary data directly into more GTM users’ hands and makes it easier for them to drive critical impact for their organizations.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
TechTarget improved its Salesforce syncing and real-time territory management. Syncing supports both standard Account and Opportunity objects and custom fields associated with these objects.
For example, customers may now build and dynamically update Priority Engine Account Lists using customer first-party account attributes such as target account lists, accounts in specific geos, or by opportunity status.
Priority Engine also supports syncing of third-party data sources stored in Account custom fields such as 6sense stages, Demandbase minutes, or Bombora scores to build Account Lists.
TechTarget VP of Corporate Communications Garrett Mann provided additional detail on the benefits of improved syncing to GZ Consulting: “The ability to dynamically sync and automatically update Priority Engine Account Lists based on customer first-party data and third-party data enables several benefits across sales, marketing, and ABM use cases, for example: (1) The ability to set and continuously update sales rep territories based on Account Owner, ensuring sales reps using Priority Engine are always seeing insights and new prospects from current account targets; (2) the ability to integrate separately purchased 6sense, Demandbase, and/or Bombora data with Priority Engine Account Intent for a single source of truth; (3) the ability to export into MAP nurture opted-in TechTarget prospects from Accounts where both TechTarget and 3rd party intent providers are seeing down-funnel demand; (4) and the ability to target TechTarget lead generation or advertising campaigns using this data.”
Other Priority Engine enhancements include:
An improved user experience and navigation that expedites account monitoring. Intent insights include new buying team members engaging, named prospects and customers researching competitors, or accounts accessing late-stage decision-making content.
A new account journey visualization that displays valuable demand-related activities at accounts across both client systems and the TechTarget network.
Streamlined user management and administration for target account lists and territory management. Admins will also benefit from simplified seat license administration and usage dashboards.
A new Opportunity Dashboard in Salesforce that displays the progression of opportunities, where go-to-market teams should take action, and where TechTarget has influenced deals.
The new Opportunity Dashboard may be viewed by deal counts or dollar volume.The Opportunity Dashboard Top Influenced Accounts.
“No matter your stack, realizing the value of RevOps sinks or swims based on the accuracy and quality of the intent and contact data – and TechTarget has that in droves,” said Sales Community Founder Randy Seidl, “The backbone of any successful GTM revenue motion isn’t how many tools you have, it’s about the insights and data that you’re using in them that unlocks value.”
B2B content syndication vendor NetLine launched INTENTIVE, their buyer-level intent platform at last week’s Forrester event in Austin. INTENTIVE offers “real-time insights into truly ‘who’ is actively expressing intent within a B2B account.”
INTENTIVE is similar to TechTarget’s Priority Engine but broader in focus. Whereas Priority Engine’s intent data is focused on enterprise and health tech, INTENTIVE supports a wider range of 247 industries, including pharma, aviation, manufacturing, and enterprise technology, etc.
“By design, TechTarget is highly focused on supporting the needs of B2B marketers and is targeting technology decision makers. They expanded to healthcare, but that’s about it,” noted Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting. “We view our platform as persona-agnostic and diversified” due to the broader scope and depth and breadth of NetLine’s audiences which now also includes Informa media properties and events.
Fortino described TechTarget Priority Engine as a “phenomenal product” but geared toward a more select audience of technology buyers. As such, Priority Engine is “Apple-esque,” while INTENTIVE is the “Android alternative in the marketplace.”
NetLine’s intent data is all “first-party-sourced data” and not cookie-based. Furthermore, it is transparent and includes professional bios, job types, job levels, locations, and engagement activity.
By surfacing individual activity data, NetLine is going beyond “black box metrics.”
INTENTIVE provides buyer-level activity data within accounts. Both online (e.g., webinars attended) and offline (e.g., conference sessions attended) activities are displayed with weights applied based on activity type.
Fortino also emphasized that INTENTIVE is both persona and industry-diversified, so not limited to IT Buyers.
INTENTIVE’s buyer-level intent activity spans 11,000 topics. Intent data is captured from millions of first-party content registrations, 285 distinct event activity types, and 329,000 keywords.
“With nearly 15k+ pieces of content on the platform, a given customer’s assets usually account for 0.03% of all content. For years, our clients gladly worked with us to source first-party leads that specifically engaged with their own content,” blogged NetLine Content Marketing Manager Jonathan Steiert. “The reality, however, is that 99% of their ICP were engaging with content on our platform—they just weren’t engaging with their content. They were missing nearly all of their buyer’s journey.”
NetLine was acquired by Informa in late 2021, so it benefits from Informa’s content and event registration data across 100 million event activities. Event Intent is gathered from over 500 annual B2B events hosted by Informa.
“We were acquired not because of what we were doing at the time but based on the vision of filling out a buyer-level intent platform on top of all of the various content consumption signals that we’re processing every single day of the year,” explained Fortino. “By being part of Informa, we were able to aggregate not only all of the content consumption and buyer behaviors occurring through all of the NetLine powered content experiences, but also all of the Informa properties and all of the Informa offline events.”
When Informa met with NetLine before acquiring it, “Informa was sitting on a massive amount of event-specific intent data that was looking for a mechanism and impetus to action that data into a subscription-oriented product.”
Fortino sees two high-level categories of intent vendors (he omits second-party review sites): Vendors such as Bombora that provide third-party intent based on page views and firms with a broad set of B2B content that drive buyer-level intent. Firms such as TechTarget and Foundry provide “some transparency into what individuals are doing on the sites that they own and operate.” The transparency gives users “a bit more granularity into downloading a white paper, webinar, and so on.”
Fortino argues that NetLine’s advantage is the scope of activity generated across Informa, NetLine, Industry Dive (34 B2B publications and newsletters), and events. Activities go beyond page views.
“There’s everything from…submitting a demo request to expressing an interest in learning more about a given topic, to taking a course and being certified, to the most extreme: going to an event and sitting in countless sessions and being scanned each time you’re going into one of those sessions. All of these 285 things are visualized inside the product as well. So, you can know that this person downloaded a toolkit that helps them predictably model X or they’ve registered for this event.”
Thus, NetLine is marrying online, offline, and customer-content-based intent data.
The signal intensity of some activities is much greater than that of others. “While pageviews can be brief, attending a conference is a very robust form of intent…Compare that to a group of people, let’s say it’s a CEO, a CTO, a director of DevOps, are flying to Vegas for four days to attend the Black Hat conference,” argued Fortino. “They’re sitting in six and a half hours of material each day for three days about malware [and] other enterprise security topics.” The difference in signal intensity is “night and day,” continued Fortino. “Those three people spent maybe 30 grand for three days going to that event.”
Furthermore, “We are looking at the seniority of the person taking those activities. We’re looking at the types of activities that they are actually doing,” including how those activities map to buyer journey stages.
Conversely, if the user is anonymous, “we’re actually disinterested in scoring that information and playing up the value of that information,” argued Fortino. Pageview-based intent is interesting but not actionable for sales reps. “If you’re telling me someone at SAP is trending for these three topics, I don’t even know where to begin.”
INTENTIVE’s real-time dashboard consolidates activity at both the buyer and account-level. Additional insights include buyer trends and confirmed projects, “a buyer-first view of professionals who have confirmed they have an active pain point, identified challenges, and shared their timeline to invest.”
Daily Buyer-Level Intent email alert
Other features include customizable email notifications, a native Salesforce app, and real-time buyer and account scores.
“Prior to today, there has been significant buzz about intent,” argued NetLine CEO Robert Alvin. “But the majority of existing intent-based products relied solely upon company IP recognition and webpage visits which doesn’t tell you “Who” is intending to do what. With INTENTIVE, NetLine has changed the meaning and raised the bar when it comes to intent. Marketers now have access to deeper buyer-level insights allowing them to accelerate the sales process from their marketing endeavors.”
Furthermore, Alvin noted that buyer-level insights eliminate hours of guesswork and accelerate prospecting, messaging, and understanding a prospect’s timeline.
Most intent solutions deliver account-level intent but lack buyer-level insights. They identify accounts (or accounts and locations), but do not usually indicate the individual behind the activity. Furthermore, other intent solutions capture their intent from one primary touch point – Pageviews.
“The basis for 99.9% of all intent data on the market comes directly from pageviews. Sans INTENTIVE, these solutions curate these data sets based upon this behavior, which lasts seconds, if not milliseconds, long,” expounded Steiert. “These pageviews are then referenced against historical baselines at the IP address and company domain. Effectively, every single existing intent vendor (thanks in large part to Bombora’s mostly commodified status sets) offers the same level of insights as their competitors.”
INTENTIVE provides a wider array of business intent at the buyer-level.
However, NetLine offers a broader array of buying activity that includes analyst reports, demo requests, disclosed areas of interest, event attendance, and confirmed projects.
“The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, said Heinz Marketing President Matt Heinz. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
The baseline INTENTIVE license includes three explorers, corresponding to three targeted intent categories with up to 25 topics per explorer. Explorers can have multiple audiences for segmentation (e.g., size, industry, geography) and email notification.
Keywords are tied to topics, but free-form keyword selects won’t be available until the V2 release.
Account and buyer Intent Trendlines and activity are available as soon as an explorer is defined.
The Explorer Dashboard displays buyer and account trendlines, accounts with buyer activity, and buyer-confirmed projects. The dashboard is displayed immediately after defining an explorer and uniquely loads historical intent data for immediate review and actioning.
Fortino noted that other intent platforms typically take 45-60 days to curate data for optimal use.
Confirmed Projects were initially sold as NetLine Intent Discovery, but that product was transitioned to a core feature within INTENTIVE.
NetLine collects first-party project data as readers register for and consume content. NetLine “intercepts those users, asks them a very short survey about their pain points, their urgency to address those pain points, challenges that they have, and most importantly, the timeline to invest in correcting those things.”
Account Activity details include confirmed projects, activity type, engaged buyers, and trending topics.
The Account Activity dashboard is filterable by function, level, and firmographics. Users may drill down to any account to see who is displaying intent and the nature of their activity. Saved filters can be set as daily email alerts.
Users can drill down from Accounts to Buyers or the reverse.
While buyer-level intelligence is provided, NetLine does not display PII beyond customer content interactions. Fortino noted that sales teams already have other vendors for contact data (e.g., ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, Clearbit), but they are not providing buyer-level intent.
“This just comes back to permission data use. I know a lot of vendors love to throw in this idea of recommended contacts where they’re really just using ZoomInfo data,” explained Fortino. “We may do that, but honestly, it’s a bit disinteresting again because it’s just commoditized data sets that everyone has access to.”
Fortino’s near-term focus is building connectors with other platforms. At launch, Salesforce is natively supported, but others will soon follow.
There is currently a waitlist for INTENTIVE access. NetLine is offering a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is similar to existing account-level intent providers but obviously delivers buyer-level insights. The license includes three explorers, unlimited seats, and the Salesforce app.
Fortino argued that the unlimited seats are a “strong differentiator when you’re evaluating existing solutions,” particularly at enterprise accounts with many users.
Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence brings together first and third-party intelligence.
ABX PlatformDemandbase announced a Smarter Sales Intelligence solution that combines Demandbase Sales Intelligence with additional tools, data, and prescriptive insights. UX enhancements include prescriptive dashboards with personalized account and contact recommendations.
The firm had a little fun with its press release, publishing a semi-tongue twister headline, “Demandbase Saves Stressed Sellers by Simplifying Sales with Smarter Sales Intelligence.” But wait! There’s More! Demandbase also released a 90-second infomercial touting their Sales Intelligence solution that “consolidates sales intelligence tools in both first and third-party data, and all in one place. It’s like having a superpower for smarter selling! Get easy access to insights, best-in-class predictive models, and contact recommendations integrated within your existing tools.”
Many of the UX changes were based on customer feedback, with the critical account information at the top. Content includes the journey stage, top intent keywords, people, predictive scores, and firmographics.
“The idea is that we’re bringing all the information that sellers care about and then presenting it on one screen so that they don’t have to go places to find it,” explained Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier to GZ Consulting. “It’s a unification of the data.”
Sellers “don’t enjoy the research aspect” of account-based selling, continued Breier. “They just want to be doing outreach.” Therefore, Demandbase is “meeting the sales reps “wherever there’s spending time, whether that is their browser, CRM, or SEP.”
The Prescriptive Sales Dashboard provides a “unified and prioritized view of a seller’s territory/account list.”
Prescriptive Sales Dashboards proactively inform sellers where they should direct their attention, when they should reach out, and what they should say. Both accounts and contacts are recommended, with suggestions specific to each rep’s territory. The Dashboard calls out the top accounts and contacts for outreach based on activity and intent; that is, which leads have the highest probability of converting into opportunities.
The Sales Dashboard offers multiple filters, identifying accounts that:
“I should reach out this week.”
“have been in the news recently.”
“are most engaged.”
“have the highest intent.”
“have a high likelihood to become an opportunity.”
And contacts that
“I should reach out this week.”
“Are not in my CRM.”
“Are part of the buying group and from Top Accounts.”
“Are former buyers.”
“Are trending on my website.”
High engagement lists are likely to be compelling for reps. In many cases, they will be aware of the engagement as they are directly involved. Still, there will also be situations where they are unaware of the engagement (e.g., Customer Success set up a trial at the account or individuals attended a webinar or responded to a marketing campaign) and missing an opportunity for outreach.
Recommendations are not black-boxed but include engagement data and known contacts in the buying group. If a rep disagrees with a recommendation, a feedback button helps train the model.
“One of the biggest risks when you’re trying to get adoption from the sales persona on something like this, is losing their trust,” explained Breier. “We want to give some context and qualify the recommendation that we’re making.”
Demandbase also identifies and recommends contacts for outreach, even if they aren’t currently in the CRM. Along with names and titles, Demandbase feeds emails, mobile phones, technographics, intent signals, and persona-based messaging. New fields include Demandbase’s predictive scores:
Pipeline Predict Score: How likely an account will become a pipeline opportunity.
Qualification Score: Likelihood an account will ever become a customer, regardless of where it is in the buyer journey.
Demandbase continues to build out its data coverage, with 83 million companies, 147 million contacts, 87 million emails, and 40 million direct dials. Much of its third-party content was integrated after they acquired InsideView and DemandMatrix two years ago.
Account Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).People Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).
Furthermore, Demandbase simplified its user interface to display the most important information about prospects and customers.
LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago. As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers. New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.
LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality. However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”
LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.
Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities. Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).
The new Sales Navigator Account Hub.
The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities. It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.
“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis. “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data. Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”
The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:
Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence. Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub. Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them. Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent
Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1. Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category. The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.
Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole. The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.
“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.
At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts. Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.
“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare. “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals. Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies. With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities
New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages. These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).
Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:
Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
New connections to colleagues
LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website
“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment. If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance. If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix. “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”
Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”
Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.
Other Search enhancements include:
A simplified saved search UX
A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
Current job title and past job title filters
The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions. Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.
LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year. The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment. At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.
IT Sales & Marketing Intelligence vendor TechTarget enhanced its intent capabilities with Confirmed Projects, a set of verified projects obtained via direct interviews with a buying team member. Confirmed Projects are planned for the next twelve months and include purchase requirements, challenges, desired outcomes, location, timeframe, and the vendor short-list.
Confirmed Projects are available through TechTarget’s Priority EngineSales Intelligence service. Project contact data are triple verified (email, phone, and employment) along with the contacts’ role in the purchase process.
“Confirmed Projects include specific insights on the technical and business purchase considerations in-market accounts are looking to address — intelligence that will dramatically increase seller efficiency and productivity because they now know where and how to concentrate their efforts to get in on real deals,” stated the firm.
Priority Engine’s enhanced territory filtering helps sales reps home in on their best opportunities.
“Thousands of B2B sellers use Priority Engine every day to fuel their outbound efforts by discovering new active buyers in their territories plus prospect-level intent that helps them break through,” said CPO Andrew Briney. “The integration of Confirmed Projects into Priority Engine gives them a unique ability to attack and revive stalled mid-funnel opportunities with precise, actionable details on verified purchase plans.”
The value proposition of Priority Engine with Confirmed Projects
Next Quarter, an AI-based Account Planning solution, partnered with Bombora to deliver third-party intent data to its Fortune 500 Clients. Next Quarter licensed Bombora’s Company Surge data to power its White Space offering. Next Quarter recommends the next best product to sell, “along with a guided path to uncover new growth opportunities.”
Bombora’s intent file helps identify in-market customers, including upsell and cross-sell opportunities, inside of Salesforce. Churn risk is also assessed.
Engagement (activity) data is gathered from Salesforce, so Next Quarter offers recommendations based on Bombora intent and account conversations.
Features include Account Chatter, Whitespace Analysis, Relationship Maps, Competitor Assessment, Target Setting, Scenario Planning & Gap Mitigation.
Next Quarter emphasizes white space opportunities at current accounts for B2B and B2G sales. Target industries include technology, pharma, management consulting, manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense.
“Sales reps can uncover potential white space opportunities and develop tailored solutions to meet their needs by building strong relationships with current customers and understanding their business goals,” blogged the firm. “Next Quarter gathers data from your historical sales trends for similar customers. Using AI algorithms, we provide a score (NQ Score) by combining historical sales data with intent data that identifies the top recommended products or services to sell.”
Users can perform scenario analyses that identify and present next best product recommendations based on similar customer groupings.
“Next Quarter is committed to helping customers increase revenue,” said Next Quarter CEO Rahul Shah. “By combining our account planning solution with Bombora’s Intent data, we can offer a unique competitive edge to help drive account growth through AI-based recommendations leveraging intent. Next Quarter’s Account Growth module is an AI-based account planning solution that identifies new opportunities, finds decision-makers and influencers, and suggests guided next steps for sales teams to grow existing accounts.”
Next Quarter, formerly ForecastEra, received $7.3 million in seed and equity funding in 2021. It supports over 5,000 users and expects to quintuple its base over the next year.
Named accounts include Boeing, BASF, Bloomberg BNA, Dell, and NTT Data.
Pricing starts at $100 per user per month. Volume discounts kick in at 100 users.
Vendors are quickly moving to integrate generative AI into their offerings. This week, Qualified and Clari announced ChatGPT functionality. Qualified GPT, which the firm describes as “Generative AI for the Pipeline Cloud,” helps B2B vendors “harness the power of AI and engage and convert their website visitors at scale.” The firm views ChatGPT as a “new platform on top of which we will build the next version of Qualified.”
When launched four years ago, Qualified focused on predictive modeling and Predictive AI to identify buying intent signals, particularly those generated from website data.
“At Qualified, our core philosophy has always been to provide the most powerful approach to pipeline generation using a combination of people, data, and automation,” said CEO Kraig Swensrud. “With the rapid advancements in Generative AI, we will be able to provide even more robust automation to our customers, allowing them to scale their efforts, focus on their highest priority tasks, and ultimately crush their pipeline and revenue targets.”
Qualified GPT supports generative text apps that automate engagement prompting, copywriting, messaging, and chatbots. Initial features include:
Auto Pounce: Automatically sends engagement prompts (or “greetings”) that serve as conversation starters for website visitors that fall within a firm’s ICP.
Auto Correct: Qualified GPT corrects misspellings, fixes grammar errors, and proofreads responses, “helping your sales reps deliver speedy, professional responses.”
Auto Tune: Enhances rep dialogue while chatting “to sound more eloquent when speaking to potential buyers, helping every rep strike just the right tone with their important customers.”
Auto Expand: Reps can enter a few words or bullet points, and Qualified GPT will craft professional messages.
Auto Suggest: AI-powered recommended conversation responses that keep reps on message and speed up response times.
Auto Translate: Translates messages, displaying both questions and answers in the customer and sales rep’s language.
Auto Personalize: Changes or recommends website text “based on visitor data to drive the highest engagement and conversion.”
Auto Summarize: Summarizes conversations and website behavior, providing sales reps with a “succinct read out of Account activity to date.”
Qualified GPT will be rolled out as a “limited release to a subset of Pipeline Cloud customers this spring.”
My plan yesterday was to deal with the sale of my house (open house Sunday with contract offers yesterday), but I couldn’t fully focus on that as important announcements were coming from Europe: B2B full-funnel marketing vendor Anteriad bought Demand Generation vendor BNZSA. Separately, Sales Intelligence and B2B data vendor Echobot, which merged with Visitor Intelligence platform Leadfeeder last year, rebranded as Dealfront and launched its new platform.
Both BNZSA and Dealfront emphasize the diversity of the European market and their ability to meet market needs across national boundaries with localized support and GDPR compliance.
BNZSA, a Madrid-based demand generation firm, has been on a tear the last few years, growing several hundred percent per annum through H1 2022 (H2 growth data was not announced). BNZSA provides Anteriad with a solid foundation for global marketing and GDPR-compliant data. In addition, it offers B2B demand generation services to over fifty multinational clients, including Oracle, SAP, Acer, Dell, and Fujitsu.
BNZSA’s team offers local market expertise and campaign support in 26 languages.
“The combination of Anteriad and BNZSA provides an industry-leading offering of B2B demand generation products and services to clients across the globe,” stated Anteriad. “The acquisition of BNZSA will enable Anteriad to expand its international data coverage by integrating BNZSA’s unique GDPR-compliant data. Bringing together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services will provide differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
MeritB2B rebranded as Anteriad in April 2021 after a series of acquisitions that expanded the company’s scope. It previously acquired several MarTech firms, including intent-data vendor True Influence (Nov 2021), ABM MarTech and Audience vendor 180byTwo (Nov 2020), and B2B data vendor Compass Marketing (Jan 2020).
“Anteriad is a company that’s ahead of its time and ahead of the market. Our positioning directly reflects our focus on being uniquely able to provide our customers the solutions they need to get ahead and take the lead,” said Anteriad CEO Rob Sanchez in 2021.
Anteriad had strong growth last year, with a 15% increase in US new customer wins and 30% globally through Mid-September. The firm enjoys loyal customers with an average retention rate of eight years. Furthermore, multi-service clients generate more than 60% of revenue, “showing the value of a full-funnel partner versus point solutions.”
The BNZSA acquisition “brings together Anteriad’s intent data, account-based marketing, analytics, and performance marketing capabilities and BNZSA’s tele-based conversion-oriented services,” providing multinational customers a “differentiated, full-funnel B2B demand generation capabilities at a global scale supported by regional and local leadership and talent.”
“BNZSA, powered by Anteriad,” will act as Anteriad’s international and EMEA headquarters. BNZSA adds three hundred employees who specialize in ABM and multi-touch campaigns. BNZSA supports programmatic display based on its firmographic, technographic, and intent datasets. Its customers can build integrated multi-channel marketing programs that leverage BNZSA’s EMEA-based, multi-lingual contact center. As leads are generated, BNZSA staff offers a “Warm Handover” process which ensures that leads are appropriately transitioned to sales teams.
Anteriad CPO Ken Lordy described the acquisition to GZ Consulting as a “highly complementary combination of data and technology assets with full-funnel campaign management.” Consequently, the combined firms “now serve the full funnel demand generation needs of all our marketing clients at a truly global scale.”
Continued Lordy, “BNZSA’s services include native language speaking BDRs at one of the largest call centers in EMEA, ensuring an individualized approach and understanding of each market’s distinct local customs.”
BNZSA identifies potential prospects for its customers, surrounds them with “messaging and brand awareness,” and collects engagement metrics that inform content development and enhance BNZSA’s prospect engagement. BNZSA tracks interest and intent and maintains an ongoing dialogue with prospects. Nurturing includes the period between contacting prospects and providing a ‘Warm Handover’ of leads to account executives.
“Following this approach has a positive uplift in conversions to our Warm Handover Process, where BNZSA agents broker, arrange, and moderate a call between the prospect and our customer’s sales or product specialist,” said Paul Briggs, BNZSA Director of Global Corporate Development in 2021. “This ultimately boosts closed-won opportunities for our customers up to 300%.”
BNZSA digital services include SEO strategy, performance marketing/SEM, email marketing, content marketing, content syndication, marketing automation, and UX and CX design.
“BNZSA understands the individualized approach and distinct local customs of each market it serves,” said Anteriad. “BNZSA’s nuance in culture across regions includes BDRs that speak over 26 native languages at one of the largest call centers in EMEA.”
The combined company offers “data, technology, and a differentiated high-touch client service model” that supports “rich B2B demand generation and ABM solutions and in-market customization at global scale.”
BNZSA CEO Brahim Samhoud maintains a “significant ownership stake in the combined business.” He will report directly to Sanchez. Samhoud emphasized that both companies have a client obsession that “will take B2B marketing to a whole new level, driven by data and technology, powered by people.”
“Anteriad means to ‘Get in Front’, and acquiring BNZSA delivers on that philosophy. By expanding our global reach through this acquisition, Anteriad establishes itself as a true global leader in tech-enabled B2B marketing solutions. BNZSA brings an extremely talented leadership team and a differentiated offering that is made even more valuable by their local presence in key markets around the world,” said Sanchez. “Leadership at Anteriad and BNZSA are both invested in our people, our clients, and our growth. With this solid foundation, we will accomplish remarkable things for our clients in the global B2B marketing community.”
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.
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.
