team.blue subsidiary Leadinfo acquired Intent-based Sales Engagement Platform Leadcamp. Leadcamp expands the Leadinfo value proposition from web visitor tracking to broader lead engagement. Leadcamp, based in Ghent, Belgium, captures email, web, meeting, and content engagement and employs AI to identify “high-intent active prospects.”
“We always want to offer our customers new products to make them more effective in their chosen markets,” said team.blue Group CEO Claudio Corbetta. “This acquisition is a great example of investing in a fast-growing business to advance our expertise and product range in the lead generation space.”
The Leadcamp Heat Score measures multi-channel engagement providing both a composite score and engagement by channels. Additionally, AI-powered notifications let reps be “proactive and timely” in their follow-ups, “avoiding missed opportunities” and increasing the odds of closing each deal.
Heat Scores also act as customizable triggers for reminders and alerts, streamlining the buying journey. Triggers include form submissions, multiple website visits within a prescribed period, Heat Score thresholds, and calls made. Leadcamp claims that trigger automation speeds up the buying process three-fold.
Email functionality includes sales email tracking, link monitoring, engagement analysis, and a content library. Sales teams also have access to sequences (cadences), templates, and volume throttling.
“We are excited about the acquisition of Leadcamp and the addition of their expertise in targeted marketing campaigns and automation tools to our platform,” commented Leadinfo Founder Han Kleppe. “This acquisition will enable us to better support our customers in finding new customers and to put their lead generation on autopilot.”
Leadinfo claims to be the market leader in Benelux and the most prominent international provider in the D-A-CH region. It consolidated its position in the Netherlands over the past eighteen months with the acquisitions of Leadexpress (December 2021) and LeadElephant (January 2022).
Leadinfo supports over 3,000 customers in Benelux, D-A-CH, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. Customers include Lavazza, Quis Machinery, Channable, and Creditsafe.
Leadinfo was named a 2022 Fast 50 technology growth leader by Deloitte, placing 8th in the Dutch market.
“The acquisition extends Bigtincan’s lead in AI-driven revenue intelligence by improving B2B sales organization’s ability to scale by delivering insights and recommendations directly to sales reps for better decision-making to increase revenue,” the firm told investors. “The SalesDirector.ai technology links people, activity, and engagement across the buyer’s journey to derive insights, including opportunity risk and relationship strength, and then makes intelligent recommendations. By capturing all sales, marketing, and customer success activity the technology drives actionable revenue insights required to make the right business decisions.”
Bigtincan stated that SalesDirector’s technology would improve its AI-powered insights capabilities and forecasting accuracy.
SalesDirector ingests data from GSuite/Gmail, Slack, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Exchange and feeds contact data (e.g., Title, Department, Level, Phone) to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. SalesDirector also captures Engagement Signals and writes them back to CRMs as custom fields:
Executive Engaged on Opportunity / Account
Single or Multi-Threaded Opportunity Relationship
Last QBR Complete / Next QBR Scheduled
Partner / Sales Engineer Engaged on Opportunity
Next Step / Meeting Scheduled
AI tools include stakeholder identification, individuals who are supporters or detractors, disengaged stakeholders, account risk scoring, sentiment analysis, and deal health.
SalesDirector.AI Account Insights and Next Best Actions.
“Every organization has to be more productive,” said Bigtincan CEO David Keane. “With the Sales Enablement market shifting towards a more holistic approach encompassing Revenue Enablement, we can deliver more value to our customers by providing full-cycle sellers with AI-driven recommendations on the next best actions based on intelligent sales analytics from SalesDirector.ai.”
SalesDirector pricing begins at $29 per user per month for activity capture. Revenue Insights pricing is not published.
AI-assisted stakeholder mapping.
Bigtincan will incorporate SalesDirector’s functionality into its product suite and phase out the SalesDirector brand.
“Traditionally, when we do small tech-focused acquisitions, they become part of the Bigtincan product suite, so that capability gets added to the existing platform we have,” said Keane. “We don’t tend to run these things as separate businesses, mostly because we miss out on some of the benefits for our shareholders of taking it all together and taking that technology and really getting in the platform. This is no different than our existing strategy – embed, connect it all together and make it something that our customers can choose to add. We do believe that it is all about choice, and we want people to be able to buy these technologies from us as additional value-added options. I think that’s going to be the case here as well.”
Bigtincan paid $1.2 million in cash and equity for SalesDirector.
The entire SalesDirector team is joining Bigtincan.
Bigtincan, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, has acquired a series of RevTech companies, including ClearSlide, Brainshark, and VoiceVibes.
Dutch lead generation vendor Leadinfo is acquiring WebProspector.de, a German visitor tracking company, with the deal closing on November 1. Deal terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition expands Leadinfo’s presence in Germany. It acquired Leading Reports in April and opened an office in Düsseldorf in July to improve its sales and support in German-speaking markets.
Leadinfo claims to be the market leader in Benelux and the most prominent international provider in the D-A-CH region. It consolidated its position in the Netherlands over the past year with the acquisitions of Leadexpress (December 2021) and LeadElephant (January 2022).
Leadinfo supports over 3,000 customers in Benelux, D-A-CH, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. Customers include Lavazza, Quis Machinery, Channable, and Creditsafe.
Both Leadinfo and WebProspector.de have focused on their partner networks, with Leadinfo supporting over 1,100 partners.
WebProspector.de clients will migrate to the Leadinfo platform and benefit from a broader set of integrations. Leadinfo supports over fifty platforms, including Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, and Salesloft.
CRM integrations are bi-directional, with Leadinfo performing duplicate checking against lead and account records. When sending to CRM, companies may be added as Lead or Account record types. Additionally, company profiles include deal and task information gathered from CRMs, and users can create new deals and tasks from Leadinfo.
team.blue visitor information displayed in the Leadinfo service.
The Leadinfo platform supports a visitor inbox, real-time lead alerts, web forms, visitor browsing recordings, and triggered workflows. In addition, its programmatic functionality supports Google Ads and LinkedIn retargeting.
Liquid Content, its site personalization functionality, adjusts websites based on firmographics. As a result, marketers can customize the text, video, content, and images presented to the visitor, allowing them to segment their website presentation.
Leads are enriched by IP address matching against a reference database of 220 million global businesses. Firmographics are gathered from global registry filings and web crawling. Firmographics include address, phone, year founded, industry codes (US SIC 87 and local codes), sizing data, company logos, social media links, business descriptions, etc. Legal information includes the registration number, entity type, ultimate parent, group size, and employees in the group. Business descriptions are generally available in the local language. Other information includes a pinned Google map, page view information, Leadinfo’s lead score, and Leadinfo tags.
Leadinfo company profiles include a proprietary lead score based on visitor behavior. However, lead scores do not yet adjust for firmographic fit; thus, a company may score high based on behavior but may not be a qualified lead.
Leadinfo displays HubSpot Deal and Task information. Sales reps can also create new tasks and deals from Leadinfo.
In July, Leadinfo was acquired by team.blue, a European cloud services provider with an office in fifteen European countries and Turkey. CEO Han Kleppe and the rest of the management team continue to run Leadinfo as an independent subsidiary.
Leadinfo is growing rapidly and was recently named to Deloitte’s Fast 50 technology list for the Netherlands.
In June, Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari acquired Conversational Intelligence vendor Wingman, bringing together two complementary SalesTech vendors. Wingman provided Clari users with additional account intelligence derived from calls, meetings, and emails. The goal was to provide “visibility plus action all the way from the boardroom to the bullpen,” said Wingman CEO Shruti Kapoor.
“The acquisition of Wingman, a leader in conversation intelligence, gives Clari’s category-leading Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversations, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes,” announced Clari. “Wingman goes beyond the limits of similar conversation intelligence tools by helping revenue-critical teams act in the moment when it matters.”
“A major part of our strategic vision is conversation intelligence, which is why we’re thrilled to announce that Clari has acquired Wingman, a leader in CI. This gives Clari’s Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversation data, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes. The full value of conversation intelligence has never been fully realized, until now. Clari helps your team move beyond siloed, departmental systems and processes that cause endless breakdowns across your revenue process and brings all revenue-critical employees into a unified platform to run revenue.”
Clari CEO Andy Byrne
“As we think about scaling our impact, it’s clear to us that we want to free up these insights for everyone who’s revenue-critical, from the bullpen to the boardroom,” blogged Kapoor. “We want to give you the ability to switch between micro (every customer interaction) and macro (the entire revenue pipeline) as easily as toggling channels on television.”
Wingman battle cards are displayed in real-time.
Wingman records, transcribes, and tags calls, storing them in a searchable library by keyword, tag (e.g., Price, Customer Pain, Blockers), or competitor mentions. Topics may be customized to capture competitors, product names, technologies, etc. Reps can also set live bookmarks across all supported video platforms.
Wingman also offers real-time battle cards, a set of short suggestions displayed in context during a call. New sales reps will be confident that they are providing accurate information consistent with company positioning. Other real-time coaching tools include long monologue alerts, word rate notices, and time-based cue cards.
Wingman game tapes provide a reference library of training snippets.
Call summaries include questions, next steps, pain points, blockers, and topics of interest. Post-call analytics include call duration, longest monologue, engaging questions that elicited a response from the prospect, and interactivity.
To assist with coaching, Wingman automatically identifies speakers and creates speech tracks, letting managers or reps focus on specific individuals. It also offers a “game tapes” library for new hire training. Game tapes provide a set of best-of-breed video samples for pricing, blockers, features, etc.
Wingman also offers Deal Central deal intelligence. Deal Central identifies deal health risks such as the lack of a decision-maker or pricing not being discussed. It is this engagement intelligence that will complement Clari’s revenue intelligence capabilities.
“We were looking at all of the signals that are important for…our customers to help them make better decisions in their revenue execution…We have had great success bringing in data from CRM systems, email systems, meeting information for calendars,” stated CTO Venkat Rangan. “One thing that we also recognized was bringing in conversational data – conversational intelligence analysis of call recordings – whether it’s voice calls or Zoom meeting calls…was going to fundamentally change the quality of the signals we bring in.”
Sales reps can also share meetings or snippets with colleagues, providing access to the customer’s voice. Reps can also share call URLs with prospects and know when prospects view them.
Wingman’s monthly pricing starts at $60 per rep. It has “no hidden setup costs, no minimum seat requirement, and no charges for sales managers & observers.”
In the summer of 2021, Wingman was named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in the Conversational Intelligence category.
When acquired in June, Bengaluru-based Wingman had 57 employees (per LinkedIn) and had doubled its ARR over the previous six months. It was founded in 2018 and claims to have over 200 customers.
“Clari’s acquisition of Wingman will help customers turn recorded conversations into a strategic asset for spotting revenue leak and driving revenue precision. At a time when leaders are looking to unify their teams and their tech stacks, adding Wingman solidifies Clari’s position as the only enterprise platform for running the end-to-end revenue process,” boasted Byrne. “Wingman’s conversation intelligence technology leads the market in real-time guidance and coaching capabilities, providing actionable insights when sellers need them most to help close deals faster. Revenue leadership can scale teams, methodologies, and go-to-market strategies with confidence knowing that all team members will have the latest messaging and collateral at their fingertips, in every conversation.”
Rangan said that Wingman was a strong fit to Clari across multiple dimensions: technologies, market approach, and culture.
Kapoor noted that the combination allows for conversational analysis at all levels. Users can Zoom into a single conversation and deal health, while managers and executives can zoom out to pipeline analytics, revenue forecasting, and deals at risk.
Bringing the organizations together was the “best and fastest way to get there together,” argued Kapoor.
Initially, Rangan would like to focus Wingman enhancements on the emerging and commercial segments due to a strong alignment between Wingman and customer needs. The Wingman roadmap also lays out steps to make Wingman mid-market and enterprise ready. Longer-term, conversational intelligence signals will be fed from Wingman into Clari and “serve all of the revenue workflows” across the boardroom, senior management, front-line management, and sales reps. Conversational intelligence will feed the forecasting and pipeline inspection processes.
Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst at Forrester, was bullish on the transaction, noting that Clari has “stayed away from deeper revenue intelligence capabilities that focus on interaction execution, preferring to aggregate that information from other tools and present it in Clari.” However, he sees four reasons that the acquisition makes sense:
Adding CI eliminates a key dependency – While Clari had access to 28% of interactions via email and calendaring, it relied on third parties to capture 45% of interactions via phone and web conferencing.
It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
Valuations have come back to Earth – Six months ago, this deal may not have made financial sense, but “with funding drying up, this is the perfect time for late-stage market leaders with large war chests to acquire technology companies at a reasonable price.”
This new capability aligns with Clari’s stated strategy – Deal health analytics derived from unstructured conversations will augment Clari’s vision of “predictable revenue growth.” It will also capture and analyze internal deal review calls and potentially update deal progress and commit status automatically. While deal status CRM updates are not a current capability, Marrs has suggested a logical future capability.
Conversation Intelligence is one of several product categories that are being merged into SalesTech platform solutions. Converging technologies include Meeting Management, Sales Engagement, Conversational Intelligence, Revenue Intelligence, and Digital Salesrooms. Clari now offers three of these (it also supports digital sales rooms via its 2021 DealPoint acquisition).
team.blue, a European cloud services provider, announced that it acquired a majority stake in European visitor intelligence vendor Leadinfo. team.blue was formed in 2019 when three hosting groups were merged into a European provider of web hosting and cloud computing services. The firm supports 2.5 million customers across fifteen European offices, aiming to “supercharge the business performance of small and medium-sized businesses. It describes itself as a “one-stop partner for web hosting, domains, e-commerce and application solutions, with more than 1,800 experts to support.”
team.blue’s twenty-five offices provide local-language and market “expertise, knowledge, and insight, serving “a rich European landscape of businesses” in fifteen European countries and Turkey.
Team.blue CEO Jonas Dhaenens is looking to augment the firm’s hosting services with B2B cloud applications. Along with Leadinfo, its value-added services include domain registries, website building (webnode), privacy and compliance tools (iubenda), and WordPress hosting (raidboxes).
Leadinfo supports over 3,000 European customers, claiming to be the market leader in Benelux and the largest international provider in the D-A-CH region. CEO Han Kleppe and the rest of the management team will continue running Leadinfo as an independent subsidiary.
Leadinfo represents team.blue’s entry into the visitor intelligence and lead intelligence spaces. It provides lead management services, including visitor intelligence and enrichment, personalization, lead generation forms, triggered workflows, screen recordings (mouse movements and clicks), and over fifty sales and marketing platform integrations. Leadinfo also supports retargeting services for Google ads and LinkedIn.
team.blue visitor information displayed in the Leadinfo service.
Leads are enriched by IP address matching against a reference database of 220 million global businesses. Firmographics are gathered from global registry filings and web crawling. Firmographics include address, phone, year founded, industry codes (US SIC 87 and local codes), sizing data, company logos, social media links, business descriptions, etc. Legal information includes the registration number, entity type, ultimate parent, group size, and employees in group. Business descriptions are generally available in the local language. Other information includes a pinned Google map, page view information, Leadinfo’s lead score, and Leadinfo tags.
Leadinfo does not disclose the name of its registered data aggregator.
Leadinfo company profiles include a proprietary lead score based on visitor behavior. However, lead scores do not yet adjust for firmographic fit; thus, a company may score high based on behavior but may not be a qualified lead.
Contact data is limited to board members and publicly listed employees from LinkedIn and Xing (a D-A-CH competitor of LinkedIn). Contacts are searchable by name and title, with users able to link to LinkedIn and Xing profiles.
Leadinfo’s visitor intelligence tracks visitors across the website, providing detailed viewing histories. The company matches IP addresses against its global company database and enriches the leads with firmographics. Visitors are viewable from a web application that supports filtering by firmographics, visitor activity, lead score, and Leadinfo tags. Screened lists may be exported as CSV files or programmatic uploads (LinkedIn and Google Ads).
Leadinfo also offers a set of dashboard widgets for tracking and analyzing website activity:
Live Widget – Tracks current visitors and site activity over the past 24 hours.
Map View – Displays visitor locations on Google Map
Companies per Province – Displays a national heat map with activity by geographic region.
Most Active Companies – Top 10 or 25 visitors
Company Size – Bar Graph by employment band
Branches – The top industries visiting the website
Most Visited – The top pages
Liquid Content, its name for site personalization, adjusts the website based on firmographics. As a result, marketers can customize the text, video, content, and images presented to the visitor, allowing them to segment their website presentation.
Leadinfo supports a set of triggers and can segment them based on how each visitor reached the website: Directly, Referral, Email Link, Paid Search (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft), Organic Search, or Social Link (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Xing, YouTube). Trigger rules support multiple custom selects; thus, lead scores may be coupled with firmographics to ensure actions are based on both visitor behaviors and firmographic fit. Based on the trigger rules, users can add or delete tags, send emails, enroll companies, and send to CRM.
Triggers are also controlled by enrollment so that additional research from a recent visitor does not trigger additional activities or notifications. Administrators set a period between activities to prevent notification spam. Firmographic variables may be used for assigning leads.
Slack notifications may be sent to a channel or person, with the user selecting the notification language. Thus, Slack triggers can be routed by firmographics for industry or territory reps and sent in the recipient’s language.
Lead forms are available and leverage Leadinfo’s visitor intelligence. While lead forms do not support triggers, the inputted lead data can be routed via Zapier to various applications.
CRM integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, MS Dynamics 365, Sugar, and Pipedrive. Other partners include Salesloft, Zapier, and Slack. Furthermore, Leadinfo has developed an extensive partner network that spans 1,200 agencies.
CRM integrations are bi-directional, with Leadinfo performing duplicate checking against lead and account records. When sending to CRM, companies may be added as Lead or Account record types. Additionally, company profiles include deal and task information gathered from CRMs, and users can create new deals and tasks from Leadinfo.
Leadinfo displays HubSpot Deal and Task information. Sales reps can also create new tasks and deals from Leadinfo.
“As a leading digital enabler for companies and entrepreneurs across Europe, we want to offer business value to our customers and partners,” said team.blue CEO Claudio Corbetta. “Leadinfo is converting visitors into leads which makes the return on investment of the software extremely tangible. Furthermore, their agency model is a perfect fit with team.blue since this customer segment is dear to us. We were impressed with the track record of Han in scaling Leadinfo to where it stands today. We’re eager to help to roll out Leadinfo into new territories.”
The 25-employee firm is based in Rotterdam and just opened its first international office in Dusseldorf. It will remain an independent company but benefit from team.blue’s operational and financial management.
Pricing is volume-based, with no charge for the core functionality (e.g., triggers, connectors, lead forms). Prices are based on the number of unique matched companies per month:
The only premium services are screen reporting and liquid content.
Leadinfo grew revenue between 2 and 3X last year. However, it did not disclose its acquisition price or revenue specifics.
Growth equity firm Great Hill Partners invested €180 million in Echobot and Leadfeeder, merging the firms into a Sales Intelligence and Go-to-market platform. Both firms are based in Europe (Germany and Finland) and will benefit from the roadmap set out by North American RevTech firms.
The merged firm will be based in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg continuing as CEO. Leadfeeder CEO Pekka Koskinen will become the CPO. The combined company has a headcount of 250 across six offices in Europe and the US. The new firm’s Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) exceeds €20 million.
Leadfeeder serves around 7,000 customers and Echobot 1,500.
Echobot’s European data coverage
Echobot offers a Sales Intelligence and B2B DaaS platform for the D-A-CH region, UK, and France. Late last year, it added a broader European data pack. It supports a database of 20 million European companies and over 60 million GDPR-compliant contacts. Company and contact data is derived from both registered filings and open web sources and includes directors, shareholders, and financials.
Echobot takes a “True Compliance” approach which gathers data only from publicly accessible sources. Furthermore, it provides verification links to the source URLs that allow reps to answer the question, “where did my data come from?” All data is hosted in Germany.
Echobot’s products include TARGET (prospecting), CONNECT (Sales Intelligence), DATACARE (B2B DaaS), and an API. In addition, Echobot offers CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SugarCRM.
“It is our goal to be the leading sales intelligence and go-to-market platform to our core European and North American markets,” said Karweg. “Thanks to Great Hill, we have now assembled the best data, AI / ML, talent, and operating experience to achieve just that. We are increasingly seeing organizations looking to take advantage of their own data and third-party data, and then to augment this intelligence with better, more personalized outreach. The combination of Echobot and Leadfeeder is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a massive market opportunity at the early stages of adoption.”
Leadfeeder IP-to-Account Visitor Intelligence
Leadfeeder offers website visitor intelligence that maps IP addresses to company intelligence. During the pandemic, it worked to identify remote workers and map them to their employers, helping refine which companies are in-market. It also supports connectors for Google Analytics, chatbots, audience retargeting, major CRMs, Zapier, and Slack.
“Integrating Leadfeeder’s web visitor identification system with Echobot’s data and prospecting solutions creates a unique platform upon which we can both enable organizations to identify and engage high-intent prospects as well as introduce incremental applications that enhance B2B sales and marketing operations,” said Koskinen.
Karweg envisions an ABM workflow that begins with an ICP analysis that identifies net-new accounts. The ICP is then mapped against Leadfeeder’s visitor intelligence and Echobot’s firmographics and event triggers to identify high-value, in-market accounts for programmatic marketing. While programmatic campaigns are not yet supported, they are in development.
Great Hill Partners has also committed an additional €50 million toward future acquisitions. In an interview with GZ Consulting, Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg indicated that the €50M in dry powder would be used towards acquiring talent, RevTech functionality, or expanded content.
The equity acquisition is a combination of primary and secondary funding, with Great Hill Partners buying out many of the original investors. It named Growth Partner Derek Schoettle Chairman of the Board and placed Great Hill Partners Managing Director Chris Gaffney and Vice President Greg Stewart on the board of the merged organization.
Schoettle is also on the board of ABX Platform Terminus, another Great Hill investment. He was the CEO of ZoomInfo when DiscoverOrg acquired it in 2019 (DiscoverOrg subsequently assumed the name ZoomInfo), so he and the new board members offer deep Go-to-Market domain expertise.
“Go-to-market is one of the fastest-growing areas of B2B software. Sales and marketing organizations need timely, accurate information and intelligent systems to identify and engage their prospects in an increasingly personalized, automated fashion. By bringing together Echobot and Leadfeeder, we can create the next-generation sales intelligence and go-to-market platform,” stated Derek Schoettle.
The transaction is a merger of equals bringing together two firms of roughly the same revenue and employee base. Both firms have over €10M in ARR and are growing rapidly. Echobot grew 70% last year, while Leadfeeder had a 50% growth figure. Echobot has long been profitable, and Leadfeeder is nearing profitability.
The firms will initially run as independent brands as they merge their operations and platforms. The deal closed a few weeks ago but was announced this morning. Thus, they have already begun combining finance and HR. The two brands will be maintained in the near term with rebranding under consideration for 2023 as Echobot is also the name of a Mirai malware variant.
Valuation figures were not disclosed, but the final price was determined before the recent valuation declines and did not change. The firms were both being advised by GP Bullhound, which suggested that packaging the two firms together would result in a more effective growth equity round. Furthermore, the two companies offered features on each other’s roadmap so were logical complements.
Europe has been tracking behind the US in the Sales Intelligence space, with several national champions now looking to offer European datasets and local UIs. European sales intelligence and B2B DaaS solutions must meet higher data compliance and privacy standards, incorporate registered data from national registers, support multiple currencies, and many languages.
Echobot covers the D-A-CH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), the UK, and France, with a general European data package added late last year. A Nordic data package has been accelerated due to the merger, which would increase its competitiveness against Dun & Bradstreet and Vainu.
“One of the most requested developments for 2021 was to access data from the entire European market. That was not only requested from German customers with a strong export to European countries, but also from new, international users that want to expand into Europe,” explained Karweg last November when Echobot added coverage of over twenty European countries.
“Europe is not one country but many, and there are differences between them, whether it’s to do with culture or data compliance,” remarked Schoettle. “Having a platform that is unique and linguistic-specific, and serving its markets with high-quality data, is a differentiator.”
“It’s a dream match,” argued Koskinen. While previously the firm purchased contact data from multiple sources, “it has been difficult to get sufficiently up-to-date and accurate data.” With the merger, Leadfeeder will offer better data quality and “have all the expertise in-house” to expand its coverage.
Along with higher quality data, Leedfeeder will benefit from a broader set of firmographics, financials, and sales triggers for data enrichment and lead scoring. Leadfeeder will also be able to cross-sell Echobot’s sales intelligence, prospecting, and data enrichment services to its 7,000 customers.
“We want to be the biggest in Europe,” stated Koskinen. “It’s going to take a few years, but I think we’re succeeding…We have long had customers all over the world. After the merger, we will be able to offer something that no one else can.”
Echobot offers German and English-language Sales Triggers.
On its earnings call last week, ZoomInfo announced a pair of acquisitions that closed on April 1: Comparably (discussed yesterday) and Dogpatch Advisors.
Dogpatch Advisors is a “modern sales advisory consultancy that helps enterprises scale revenue operations, build sales playbooks, use data and insights to create and refine sales, and build outbound operations functions.” In addition, Dogpatch will “enable ZoomInfo to further drive Enterprise and Strategic revenue through expanded customer playbooks that utilize more data and product categories.”
Dogpatch was immediately rebranded as ZoomInfo Labs, providing a “new go-to-market thought leadership team” that “drives go-to-market data analysis, product enhancements, and strategy for our enterprise customers.”
Dogpatch CEO Ben Salzman will be heading up ZoomInfo Labs.
“This will immediately expand our capabilities for enterprises and drive enhancements across our suite of products,” stated Schuck. “Over time, we expect ZoomInfo Labs to put the modern go-to-market playbook within reach of every company.”
“Dogpatch Advisors is professional services and consultancy firm that helps enterprises build out their go-to-market efforts using data and insights and software to make those go-to-market efforts incredibly effective and efficient. And when we talk with our customers and our prospects…they want a world where their go-to-market motions are driven by data, where our software is interconnected seamlessly, where they have the ability to run innovative sales playbooks, but they don’t have a pathway to get there.
What we’re hoping to do with ZoomInfo Labs is to provide a mechanism to help our customers see a future that’s innovative, that’s data-driven, where systems are integrated and talk to each other, where our data cloud sits at the foundation of that, and our application layer drives the interconnectivity of that motion… [ZoomInfo Labs] is designed to help our customers not only see that vision but then also achieve that.”
ZoomInfo CFO Cameron Hyzer
Both acquisitions closed on April 1 but were announced on May 2. Individual deal terms were not disclosed, but the two firms were acquired for “approximately $145 million, inclusive of the purchase of a convertible promissory note and cash, net of cash acquired, subject to adjustments for working capital, transaction-related equity awards, and other customary adjustments.”
ZoomInfo also agreed to pay up to $28 million in equity awards “subject to continued employment and/or attainment of certain financial metrics.”
“We expect these acquisitions to contribute revenue in the low teens millions of dollars in 2022 and create a modest drag on margins of one to two points for the remaining quarters this year,” said Hyzer.
CEO Cameron Hyzer said that Dogpatch was more than an acquihire deal. While it has a small employee base, Dogpatch has “relationships and a history of really delivering great go-to-market consulting engagements for large clients.”
“It’s a handful of people, but I think that they very much box outside of [its weight] class in terms of the value they’re able to deliver,” continued Hyzer. “And we think that by bringing that on and being able to deliver those engagements that we’ll be able to further accelerate the solutions that we’re offering as well.”
Technology media company IDG Communications acquired Halifax-based intent data vendor LeadSift. LeadSift identifies a daily digest of in-market leads, “allowing B2B marketers to craft the appropriate messaging for outreach and sales follow-up resulting in robust new business opportunities.”
Over the past eighteen months, IDG has been assembling elements of a MarTech solution, having acquired
Triblio – Acquired in 2020, The Triblio ABM platform supports account-based advertising, website personalization, sales activation, orchestration, and intent-based audiences. Triblio is integrated with Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Salesloft. In addition, Triblio recently added a Smart Score that employs AI for account prioritization. The Smart Score uses first and third-party intent, website activity, and CRM data “to identify what accounts should be prioritized for sales outreach.”
KickFire – Acquired in September, KickFire provides a cookieless, privacy-compliant visitor id service (first-party intent) that de-anonymizes website traffic at the account level and enriches it with firmographics.
LeadSift – LeadSift captures third-party, cookieless intent data at the account and contact level. Each week it captures 80 million intent signals. The LeadSift database spans 20 million companies and 30 million contacts. Customers can create custom triggers based on keywords, job postings, and competitor names.
KickFire and LeadSift are complementary intent services. KickFire identifies in-market buyers on a company website, and LeadSift determines which companies are in-market based on B2B media search activities.
IDG also recently launched a second-party intent data service called IDG Neon that leverages B2B Media interactions with “verified data from personal interactions with technology audiences across events, conversations, and surveys.” Intent data is gathered from the nearly 45 million global B2B technology purchasers and influencers registered across its proprietary network of digital tech publications.
Neon captures branded conversations, event attendance, roundtable participation, conversations with event sponsors, and individuals posing questions at event sessions. This level of “deeper engagement” indicates “stronger intent.”
IDG brands include CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, Macworld, NetworkWorld, PCWorld, and Tech Hive.
“Expectations of tech marketers have never been higher as the technology landscape continues to become more competitive. By positioning IDG at the intersection of media and MarTech, we help B2B marketers navigate the customer journey across a dynamic ecosystem by leveraging unmatched data sets. LeadSift’s technology is further enhancing our unique intent data that drives ROI for our customers.”
IDG Communications President Kumaran Ramanathan
“The buying journey for B2B technology purchases are extremely complex and involve multiple decision-makers,” said LeadSift co-founder Sreejata Chatterjee. “Having a view into those intent signals at the contact level provides a massive competitive advantage and directs your sales team to engage with the right buyers at the right time.”
LeadSift was founded in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2012, focusing on “mining information from public web sources to help businesses identify and engage their customers in the buying journey.” They were an early proponent of intent data, recognizing its value before it became a core element of ABM programs.
“It is obvious the company that has the most depth and breadth of data wins the B2B demand generation space,” wrote Das and Chatterjee to their customers. “IDG.com being the #1 Tech Media company with troves of proprietary first-party intent-data across event attendance, engagement with editorial articles, branded conversations, and human-verified insights has a massive head start. Imagine how scalable and actionable our intent signals will be once we integrate our 3rd-party real-time web-based intent signals with this proprietary first-party intent data stream.”
IDG, based in Boston, provides LeadSift with global reach and access to enterprise customers. It also offers complementary intent data sets and the Triblio marketing platform for activating the intent datasets.
“3rd-party intent data is one piece (albeit a very important one) of the overall B2B marketing and demand generation puzzle,” continued Das and Chatterjee. “But what if you could know all the information about your first-party web visitors (IDG | KickFire), cross-reference and prioritize them with 3rd-party intent signals (LeadSift + IDG proprietary first-party data), activate them seamlessly across digital channels (IDG | Triblio), and run highly targeted lead generation programs, all from one single dashboard!”
IDG sees itself at the intersection of media and MarTech. However, it is not the only tech media vendor playing this angle. For example, TechTarget and Ziff Davis also combine B2B media assets, events (TechTarget’s are digital), multiple categories of intent data, and activation platforms.
“IDG’s goal of moving to the intersection of media and MarTech is to help B2B marketers navigate the customer journey across a dynamic ecosystem by leveraging unmatched data sets,” stated Ramanathan. “LeadSift’s technology is further enhancing our unique intent data that drives ROI for our customers.”
Account-level intent starts at $12,000 per year.
Last week, they launched LeadSift 360, a contact-level intent service that supports both keyword and research-based intent signals gathered from over five data sources. LeadSift360 starts at $30,000 per year. IDG did not disclose deal terms. LeadSift’s management and staff of fifteen will continue to operate in Halifax.
Informa, a UK-based intelligence and events company, acquired B2B content syndication vendor NetLine Corporation, adding audience development, buyer-level intent, and B2B digital demand generation capabilities. The firm also announced that it had taken a stake in Totem, its OEM partner for ConnectMe, a virtual and hybrid event solution.
NetLine will join Informa Tech, “one of the world’s largest providers of intelligence, industry forums, and marketing services to the tech industry.” Informa Tech supports over 250 global events, 40 media publications (e.g., Information Week, ITPro Today, Network Computing), newsletters, research (Ovum, IHS Markit | Technology, Heavy Reading, and Tractica), and training.
NetLine’s B2B content syndication lead generation network reaches more than 125 million unique visitors per month and processes more than 700,000 leads monthly.
Back in July, NetLine rolled out Lead Management Platform, a SaaS solution for capturing B2B leads and amplifying marketing content. The Lead Management Platform, initially developed for tier 1 B2B media companies, supports centralized lead capture, qualification, routing, and analytics tied to amplification campaign capabilities. The Lead Management Platform requires no coding, allowing marketers to quickly test and rollout white-labeled gated content.
“The platform is entirely focused on helping marketers more efficiently translate their gated content experiences into more efficient outcomes,” explained NetLine’s Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting in July. “If and/or when the Marketer has the need to increase lead volume beyond what their own channels can support, they can simply convert their inbound oriented campaign already built within the interface, add a budget, and tap into NetLine’s audience for on-demand scale. No IOs, no negotiations, no phone calls. Simple on-demand access to [the] largest B2B lead generation platform on the web.”
NetLine immediately matches visitors against its 52 million global B2B contact database (60% US) via cookies or email addresses. In addition, lead forms are both customizable and dynamic, allowing companies to specify which information is to be captured and dynamically removing fields in its form display.
NetLine claims that over 70% of its audiences are immediately recognized so that there is zero or limited typing required. Most users will be required to enter only five to seven fields, a significant reduction in data entry versus traditional and non-predictive forms. And because data entry is reduced, abandonment rates are lower, generating a higher return on marketing spend.
The lead forms are content-form agnostic. A common format can be deployed against all content, including webinars and virtual experiences, resulting in a standard data capture format for all content categories. Forms are also customizable, supporting both basic themes and white-labeled user experiences that match corporate templates.
When a form is submitted, NetLine auto-generates confirmation emails and shares data with enterprise software platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, and ON24. In addition, dynamic filtering removes leads that are poor candidates from being distributed to downstream systems. As a result, the content is fulfilled, but low-quality leads are not passed downstream.
The Lead Management Platform lets marketers amplify content to targeted audiences with an open auction CPL pricing. Marketers “simply convert native campaign, add budget, and gain immediate access to the largest volume of content-generated B2B buyer-level data on the web, where more than 700,000 first-party leads are generated across more than 300 industries each month.”
Amplification is targeted, with ads displayed based upon geography, company size, function, and level. Marketers may also upload company names or domains for targeted ABM campaigns.
CPL pricing begins around $4 per lead, subject to a monthly budget.
“Before today, B2B Marketers needed at least a handful of technologies to run their lead gen programs: software to capture, enrich, scrub, filter, fulfill, report within their own sites and an entirely different suite of vendors to amplify their content beyond the reach of their inbound forms,” said Fortino in July. “Now, B2B Marketers can do it all with one simple self-service interface. Whether they want to centralize lead capture or create a hub for qualification, routing, analytics, and companion content amplification campaigns, the platform does it all, allowing B2B Marketers to reduce their costs while simultaneously becoming more efficient in the process.”
A free version supports up to five campaigns and 100 leads per month with dynamic forms, integrations, and reporting. The Standard version, priced at $49 per month, supports 50 campaigns, 500 leads per month, and custom colors and styles. For enterprise marketers, the Pro edition, priced at $199 per month, supports unlimited campaigns and leads, fully customizable branding, and one custom domain with unlimited sub-domains.
Both monthly and annual pricing are available, with annual pricing discounted by 20%.
Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of a pair of digital B2B data companies to support its Audience Solutions. (Part I). Today, I’m covering the Eyeota acquisition.
Eyeota supports a global methodology for onboarding offline and online data in a privacy-compliant and globally consistent way without the use of personally identifiable information (PII).
“In today’s market, brands need the ability to bridge real-world insights into the digital space in order to communicate more effectively with their customers and prospective customers,” states the firm’s About Us. “Yet the market has never been so difficult for brands to navigate. The challenge is finding the best ways to capture and activate audience data and to do so in a way that they can be confident is authentic, trustworthy and reliable.”
Eyeota builds audiences “based on what people are buying, watching, listening, reading, and interacting with in both the digital and offline world” that takes into account consumer demographics, behavior, and psychographics.”
Eyeota supports a broad set of global ad buying platforms, trading desks, DMPs, DSPs, and ad networks, including Adobe, Google Marketing Platform, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Oracle Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce DMP. Eyeota also supports social targeting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
“Eyeota’s expansive global data onboarding and activation capabilities are underpinned by our commitment to delivering audience solutions at scale, and we are proud of the work we have accomplished to develop one of the most powerful, agile, and interoperable frameworks for delivering addressable data in a privacy-conscious era,” said Kristina Prokop, Chief Executive Officer of Eyeota. “By combining forces with Dun & Bradstreet and NetWise, we will be able to offer a more holistic B2B audience platform to our clients, leveraging a powerful combination of data, technology, and insights that help clients better target and engage audiences across global markets and digital channels.”
Eyeota’s products extend the Audience Solutions business into campaign execution and “being online and participating more fully in the B2B MarTech and AdTech supply chain.”
Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring 100% of the outstanding ownership interest in Eyeota for an estimated purchase price of $165 million upon closing, subject to net working capital adjustment. The deal is expected to close by November 5.
Eyeota has 84 employees and grew its headcount 12% over the past year. Founded in 2010, it maintains four offices in the U.S. and outposts in Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Pune, Berlin, and London.
