MarTech Supply and Demand Analysis from Frans Riemersma
After I wrote about the revised 2022 MarTech Landscape, Frans Riemersma, who helped Scott Brinker update the MarTech Landscape, shared an analysis of supply and demand among various MarTech categories. The light shading represents the “demand” side of MarTech, as captured in the frequency by which apps appear in 718 tech stacks. The dark shading represents the “supply” side of MarTech in a particular category, as represented in the MarTech Landscape.
According to their analysis, MarTech “Monopolies” exist where there is significantly more demand than supply (technically, they are oligopolies). Segments marked by many buyers and few suppliers include Social & Search Advertising, ABM, and Mobile & Web analytics.
Conversely, MarTech competition exists in segments with more vendors than demand. Competitive segments include Mobile Marketing, Live Chats & Chatbots, and eCommerce Platforms & Carts.
Riemersma identified niches as segments with a low number of suppliers and limited demand. Niche segments include Native/Content advertising, Video Marketing, Marketing Analytics, and Performance & Attribution.
Technology Intelligence vendor HG Insights acquired fellow data vendor Intricately. The acquisition provides HG Insights with global cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data, “adding to HG’s market-leading optimization of the world’s top technology brands’ Go-To-Market.”
The entire Intricately team has joined HG Insights, including CEO Michael Pollack and CTO Fima Leshinsky. Pollack assumed the role of EVP of Market Innovation, and Leshinsky was named an SVP of Product.
HG Insights’ NLP gathers technology installation and spend intelligence for eleven million global companies, capturing 96% of the world’s total IT spend and intelligence on over 15,600 installed products.
“We started Intricately to provide decision-makers with actionable data and insights they could use to plot a course through the ever-expanding Cloud universe. At the time, we saw a world with individuals relying on gut instincts, teams making ‘best guesses,’ and organizations making big bets on circumspect data. We started this business with the goal of making the unknown known. Our vision was, and has always been, to be the authoritative source of truth for digital product adoption, usage, and spend.”
Intricately Founders Fima Leshinsky and Michael Pollack
Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings. Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure. Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.
“Intricately provides unique and actionable insights that enable cloud sellers to increase velocity by focusing on the highest potential opportunities,” said Pollack. “As the workforces of global companies become increasingly distributed, cloud spend and product adoption have become key indicators when assessing potential buyers’ likelihood of purchasing and deploying new products. Intricately’s intelligence, now part of HG Insights, is uniquely positioned to lead the market on this trend.”
Intricately Cloud Intelligence
Intricately’s customers include the top three cloud companies. In addition, the acquisition provides “real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack.”
“Now, with the addition of Intricately, we can provide real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack to provide richer insights for better decisions and faster results,” said HG Insights CEO Elizabeth Cholawsky. “Our customers have come to rely on HG Insights as an indispensable input into their most strategic decisions such as market sizing, whitespace analysis, and territory planning as well as for fundamental activities including opportunity prioritization and account-based marketing intelligence.”
HG Insights and Intricately offer complementary spend data. HG Insights focuses on projected spend for forecasting and go-to-market planning while Intricately measures actual spend for benchmarking and plan measurement. Combined, the companies offer “unmatched spend insights in the Cloud Market that support the full lifecycle of Plan, Optimize, and Execute to empower sales and marketing organizations.”
HG Insights listed a series of technical benefits:
Richer combined datasets to operationalize the planning, targeting, and messaging to prospects based on technology adoption and usage
Improved precision of workload volumes, estimated spends, and the related technologies running on cloud-based infrastructure
Expansion of insights into customer-built cloud and self-hosted applications
Detailed location insights providing a view into both the location of consumption and/or physical infrastructure to power hyper-focused Go-to-Market strategies
Real-time detection of changes to a company’s cloud application and technology strategy
Business professionals can leverage HG Insights expanded intelligence to evaluate their TAM/SAM/SOM, prioritize ABM campaigns, establish “equitable and efficient” sales territories, and determine which prospects have the highest propensity to buy. In addition, sales reps can identify prospects evaluating other vendors or shifting their usage patterns, signals that an account is at risk.
“With this new intelligence in its offering, HG will provide game-changing insights that transform our customers’ Go-To-Market initiatives and accelerate growth,” HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss told GZ Consulting. “Strategy, marketing, sales, and operations teams can leverage this insight to answer critical business decisions with greater confidence.”
The addition of Intricately Cloud insights helps answer the question, “What is Coming?”
“By adding Intricately’s market-leading workload and usage data, we’ll give our customers the most detailed, unique picture available of an account’s technology strategy; not just what they have, but why they have it, how they’re using it, and ultimately, what they’re likely to do next. It’s a competitive advantage unmatched in the market,” stated Moss.
Intricately was founded in 2014 and is based in San Francisco. LinkedIn states that it has 54 employees, having grown its headcount by 35% in the past year and 93% over the past two. However, its employment plateaued last November.
“At this time, we will be business as usual until the transition is completed,” stated Moss. “This includes retaining current office locations.”
HG Insights did not disclose any size or growth details. It also did not disclose the acquisition price. Intricately is HG Insights’ second acquisition. In 2018, the firm acquired Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.
ZoomInfo continued its rapid growth, posting GAAP revenue of $222.3 million, up 59% year-over-year. Growth was both organic (52%) and via acquisitions (7%), with a net retention rate of 116%, up from 108% in 2020. Revenue grew 13% on a sequential basis.
Roughly half the increase in net retention was due to new functionality, and half was due to improvements in gross retention and lower down-sell rates associated with the initial shock of COVID in 2020.
CEO Henry Schuck is bullish about their new MarketingOS offering as part of RevOS. Since acquiring Clickagy 16 months ago, the firm has been building out ABM expertise in its engineering, product, strategy, and customer success teams to bring the new marketing suite to market.
“In all of our prelaunch diligence, we heard over and over again that the applications that marketers were leveraging to do account-based marketing were falling short for one main reason,” detailed Schuck. “The data being leveraged in those platforms was both inaccurate and incomplete. And that’s no surprise. Today’s ABM platforms were all designed to leverage a company’s own first-party data that exists in their CRM or marketing automation system.”
“And in 15 years of running ZoomInfo, I’ve never heard a rep manager or revenue leader describe that type of data as either complete or accurate. Yet without accurate and complete data, marketers aim advertising dollars at the wrong company and target the wrong people at those companies. They deliver fruitless leads to sales, which erodes confidence and fails to build alignment between sales and marketing. So, we built MarketingOS the same way we build every application with our best-in-class data at the foundation of the application layer…
For today’s B2B revenue teams, data, insights, technology, and orchestration are core to the motion they use to market and sell their products. But these capabilities are siloed. Some can be found in marketing tech or revenue operations, while others are in the sales tech stack.”
ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck
MarketingOS also benefits from ZoomInfo’s longstanding presence among sales teams, improving the credibility of marketing data and removing channel conflict induced by sales and marketing standardizing on different third-party reference databases.
According to Schuck, the RevOS positioning helps reps better explain ZoomInfo’s broad value proposition:
“What RevOS does for us, and what the different platform and product pillars do for us, is it gives us a cohesive story that we can tell all across our business from our enterprise business to our mid-market business to our SMB business. And we believe that the products that we’ve put together have applicability across customers of all sizes…What it does from an enablement perspective is it gives our sellers the ability to go into those conversations in a way that allows them to articulate the broad spectrum of the platform in a way that our customers are understanding much more clearly.”
ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck
It test-marketed the RevOS positioning in December and January and found that the updated messaging raised both the win rate and average sales price. RevOS messaging helps reps position Chorus, RingLead, and Engage at the beginning of conversations.
ZoomInfo now presents itself as a best-of-breed platform that replaces disparate elements of the sales and marketing tech stacks.
ZoomInfo, which announced the RevOS ABM Platform last week, is positioning itself as a best-of-breed platform for revenue teams. ZoomInfo offers a unified platform for sales and marketing, removing the need to stitch together many point solutions that address individual workflows or problems. With over 10,000 MarTech solutions alone (according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec), selecting and integrating many services has become increasingly difficult. Conversely, go-to-market platforms such as ZoomInfo ABM Platform manage data, workflow, analytics, forecasting, and communications.
ZoomInfo is not looking to displace systems of record such as CRMs or MAPs but to synchronize with them and enrich their data. For the past few years, it has been growing beyond traditional sales intelligence (companies, contacts, technographics, event triggers) to workflow, data orchestration, and engagement tools (webforms, visitor intelligence, programmatic marketing, chat, triggered workflows, sales cadences, engagement analytics, conversational intelligence, pipeline forecasting, etc.). In 2021 it shifted from content acquisitions (e.g., Zoom Information contacts, Clickagy intent, Everstring business graphs) to orchestration (e.g., RingLead) and Engagement (e.g., Insent chat and Chorus Conversational Intelligence and forecasting) acquisitions.
Likewise, ZoomInfo’s expanded product offerings support Sales Engagement, Recruitment, and ABM.
“We significantly expanded our offering by developing an application layer on top of our best-in-class data assets and acquiring and quickly integrating chat conversation intelligence and orchestration technology into the platform,” explained Schuck. “These innovations enabled us to add more new customers than ever before and drove increasing levels of sales to existing customers and record net revenue retention of 116%, up from 108% in 2020.”
From a GTM perspective, ZoomInfo is not looking to verticalize its platform but focus more on functional specialization. As a result, the new RevOS platform positioning focuses on four functions: Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Recruitment.
“It’s more aligned around personas that we sell to,” explained Schuck. “The new packaging and models that we’re rolling out are aligned around persona, so a sales persona, a marketing persona, an operations persona, and a recruiter and talent acquisition persona. And that’s the way we really think about our offering and the way that we take them to market.”
Dun & Bradstreet launched D&B Rev.Up, a new RevTech product line that brings together first and third-party data in “an open and agnostic platform that aligns teams, data, and technology to deliver relevant and engaging buyer experiences for target accounts.” The datasets are unified via D&B Lattice, the CDP Dun & Bradstreet acquired in 2019.
The first offering is D&B Rev.Up ABX, which supports “first- and third-party data, activation capabilities and measurement, on top of its industry-leading customer data platform (CDP), giving sales and marketing teams a singular view of an account from targeting to revenue.”
“As sales and marketing leaders move to shared revenue responsibility, it becomes important to gain a common view of the customer throughout the buying lifecycle,” said Dun & Bradstreet CMO Stacy Greiner. “We designed D&B Rev.Up ABX to simplify marketing and sales workflows by providing data, targeting, activation, and measurement in one platform, using an open architecture that allows teams to complement and capitalize on existing investments.”
D&B Rev.Up ABX aligns teams, data, and technology.
The new ABM service supports a channel-agnostic, “360-degree view” of accounts, contacts, campaigns, and sales plays. Four ABX channels are supported:
D&B Rev.Up ABX for Ads deploys paid media campaigns across demand-side platforms (DSPs) and social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, theTradeDesk, Google Video & Display360, Verizon Media, Xandr, and MediaMath. ABX for ads is available as either a managed service or a self-serve option. The managed services option supports media, data, execution, and analytics.
Revenue teams can target by role, firmographics, technographics, and intent data. They can then engage audiences via programmatic advertising, paid search, and social media.
D&B Rev.Up ABX for Web supports visitor intelligence, tying visitor activity to accounts across both offices and homes. The service also pre-populates shortened forms, personalize websites, and deploys a tracking pixel to tie engagement back to D-U-N-S Numbers.
Because users select the company name from a type-ahead, drop-down list of names and addresses, the user only needs to enter a partial company name. Dun & Bradstreet then enriches the record with firmographics, linkage, and D-U-N-S numbers. According to Andrew Berg in Dun & Bradstreet Analyst Relations, the “waterfall matching technology” combines IP, cookie, and API matching logic. The API type-ahead drop-down matching is completed in under 200 milliseconds after the first two characters are entered into the company name field on a form.
D&B Rev.Up ABX for Sales builds lists for sales teams, rates opportunities, and activates sales plays with connectors to SalesTech solutions. ABX for Sales supports predictive analytics, propensity modeling, sales plays, sales recommendations, and buyer propensity tracking. SDRs may engage customers and prospects via Outreach sequences. SalesLoft support is planned for later this year.
Sales Engagement sequences can be driven by first and third-party intent, marketing engagement data from MAPs, and Folloze engagement.
D&B Rev.Up for Email builds targets audiences and activates email campaigns via Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot (June GA), and Pardot (June GA). Functionality includes campaign building, opt-in/opt-out support, and engagement analytics.
Analytics partners include Google Analytics, Optimizely, Adobe Target, and Adobe Analytics. Other partners include Outreach and Salesforce.
“Teams aren’t trapped in a single, enclosed platform like other tech on the market. D&B Rev.Up ABX integrates and works with their existing Martech and SalesTech so that they can activate in one channel, many, or all of them in a consistent and orchestrated way. They gain the power of the Data Cloud and our CDP, while also being able to use tools they already have,” blogged Greiner. “This openness and flexibility helps teams to work efficiently and means they can maximize previous investments and use dollars wisely. You can choose the full power of D&B Rev.Up ABX, or use it just in one channel – ads, email, web, sales plays – and then scale up to achieve a coordinated conversation with buyers everywhere they’re likely to engage.”
ABM Platform RollWorks announced Journey Stages. The new feature “gives B2B marketing and sales teams deeper insight into the impact of go-to-market activities on account progression.”
Journey Stages determines the stage of the buying journey and activates stage-specific, multi-channel campaigns based upon this intelligence. Journey Stages helps revenue teams “uncover insights about account journeys, measure account progression and regression, and understand key drivers and trends for any velocity changes between stages.”
Journey Stages lets sales and marketing professionals target and orchestrate multi-channel account-based campaigns based upon the journey phase. Journey Stages tracks account progression based upon custom definitions across the full customer lifecycle.
RollWorks Journey Stages Account Progression.
“For example, if a bulk of your accounts are ‘unaware,’ you may prioritize brand programs over lower funnel plays,” blogged RollWorks Lead Product Manager Mark Miller. ”If you see that a bulk of your accounts are ‘aware,’ you’ll likely focus on pulling them down the funnel with different offers. Essentially, you’ll have the information you need to toggle certain programs and budgets on and off at the ready.”
“We’re eager to bring this robust set of identification and measurement features to market,” said Justin Cooperman, VP of Product at RollWorks. “With Journey Stages and additional journey functionality shortly to come, RollWorks gives marketers a new layer of end-to-end insights to help them better understand the impact of their Account-Based campaigns, enabling finer tuning of their ABM programs for pipeline progression and revenue growth.”
Journey Stages is currently in beta, with GA scheduled for Summer 2021.
Demandbase, which pushed Account Based Marketing (ABM) as a business strategy a half-decade before other firms picked up the terminology, is now positioning Account-Based Experience (ABX) as the next generation ABM strategy. ABX supports buyers across the full customer lifecycle and emphasizes messaging timing and an improved customer experience.
“Account-Based Experience takes the same principles as good CX — trust, empathy, and relevance at every stage of the journey — and applies them to the account-based world,” states Demandbase. “One of the fundamental principles of ABX is recognizing that our buyers live in a world of information abundance and attention scarcity, making any form of interruption marketing ineffective. Instead, companies need to build trust with potential buyers, identify the ‘magic moments’ when customers are open to engaging, and then orchestrate the perfect interactions across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams.”
By broadening the scope of ABM, “it keeps the customer where they should be, at the center of your go-to-market strategy, whether you are in marketing, sales, an SDR, or part of the customer success team,” said Demandbase VP and ABX Evangelist Beki Scarbrough. “In many ways, ABX simply takes the best practices that have emerged around ABM and applies them across your customer experience.”
According to a 2021 ABM Benchmark Study by Demandbase and RevOps Squared, “53% of businesses say that Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success are equally responsible for their account-based customer expansion strategy.”
Demandbase notes that ABM focused on account fit, defining the Ideal Customer Profile as the most valuable accounts for targeting, but failing to account for timing. Thus, many ABM accounts had a “poor experience” due to mistimed engagement. When account outreach is mistimed, prospects are unable to engage “on their own terms and on their own schedule.”
Demandbase also recognized that ABM focused on the marketing department and not the broader revenue team. While ABM starts in the marketing department, it has long been understood that ABM encompasses marketing, sales, and customer success management.
“Our belief in ABX positions us to expand the ABM category within the industry,” said Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol, calling it a “powerful go-to-market strategy.”
“ABX uses data and insights to orchestrate relevant, trusted marketing and sales actions throughout the B2B customer lifecycle. It’s all about engaging business buyers with relevant messages delivered in a trusted way on their own terms.”
Demandbase CEO Gabe Rogol
One of my criticisms of Demandbase is that they were focused on the marketing department with few tools for other departments. While they acquired Sales Intelligence vendor Spiderbook five years ago, the service withered. Their technology partner list is heavily weighted to marketing with few sales-oriented partnerships beyond SalesLoft and Outreach. Likewise, the ABM Leadership Council that they founded was marketing-centric and lacked vendors that supported other departments. Conversely, the parallel Flip My Funnel movement, championed by rival Terminus, has long had a broader set of vendors and departments served.
Thus, Demandbase’s shift to ABX is a welcome update to their ABM vision and hopefully involves a broader functional scope of their offerings. Unfortunately, Demandbase did not reveal any new functionality in support of ABX, so we’ll have to see how they plan to implement this broadened definition. On April 7th, Jon Miller, Demandbase’s Chief Marketing and Product Officer, will provide additional ABX details at a webinar.
“I’ve always described Account-Based Marketing as ‘fishing with spears’,” said Miller. “It’s a great analogy, but you’ve got to realize that it doesn’t feel very good to get poked by a spear! Similarly, B2B buyers today want to research potential solutions anonymously, on their own schedule, until the time when they actually do want to engage with a vendor. ABX lets us work with modern buyers on their own terms: anonymously when they want to be, helpful and relevant when they are ready, and always based on trust. It’s a much better customer experience and it delivers much better long-term results.”
Chatbot vendor Insent.AI closed on a $2 million seed round “to help mid-market B2B companies improve how they identify and communicate with potential buyers.” The firm, which competes against Intercom, Terminus Chat, and Drift, calls itself a “human-first chatbot.”
Insent said that it isn’t “just building a chatbot that generates leads, but a collaborative platform that is going to help marketers create, nurture qualified opportunities, and shorten sales cycles.”
The goal is to remove “digital walls” between buyers and sellers by replacing web forms and follow-ups “with instant live conversations on websites” that schedule meetings and deliver “personalized content recommendations based on engagement history.”
Insent describes itself as an “integration first platform,” with MAPs, CRMs, and ABM Platforms “to help sales teams talk to engaged prospects while they’re on the website.”
According to Insent Digital Marketer Aatharsha Jey, “integrations should be planned and carried out in a way that does not ask people to change their behaviors in order to adopt a new tool.”
“By guiding their buyers at the right time and proactively alerting your salespeople, Insent generates new revenue opportunities and accelerates existing ones,” said CEO Arjun Pillai.
Emergent Ventures led the round with participation from BAM Ventures, TechStars, Arka Venture Labs, Arali Ventures, and Bizable founder Aaron Bird. Funds will be deployed to expand its chatbot integrations and add engineering, sales, and marketing headcount. Another area of development is improving its visitor data intelligence to improve personalization.
“We believe the B2B sales process currently has unnecessary friction for both buyers and sellers,” said Anupam Rastogi, Partner at Emergent Ventures. “As an increasing proportion of sales is digitally intermediated and more leads are generated online, we believe Insent has a tremendous opportunity to help both buyers and sellers do their work more effectively and connect seamlessly.”
Initially, the pandemic slowed Instent’s growth as marketing teams reduced budgets and delayed decisions, but chatbots are high on the list of MarTech digital acquisition solutions. Since May, revenue has quadrupled.
Aaron Bird, former VP at Adobe and CEO of Bizable, remarked that marketing had undergone two major paradigm shifts over the past few years, the rise of ABM and a focus on the buyer experience at the heart of the sales process; however, “companies are yet to start adapting to this paradigm. Insent is a key piece of the puzzle to help them do so.”
Insent stress-tested various platforms before settling on MongoDB and AWS. Pillai contends that the platform gives them a five-year or six-year window before rearchitecting. The platform was designed with an account-based, versus lead-based, architecture that ties leads to accounts for account-based orchestration.
“So, the architecture is obviously manually decided. But as far as the scaling is concerned, it is all automated,” said Pillai. “There are enough database services that will enable us to run automated services of scaling up and scaling down … to make sure that when you are sleeping if a customer connects a 10 million [record] database, the system scales up.”
Insent is using 6Sense for visitor identification. “We go and task 6Sense through an API,” said Pillai. “We take that data, and we do further processing of that data. All of this happens in microseconds. Basically, the moment somebody lands on the website, boom, the API call comes back with the data based on that website, company visitor.”
Insent was founded in 2018 and has forty employees in the US, Canada, and India.
Technology purchase intent data vendor TechTarget added another arrow to its intent quiver with the acquisition of BrightTALK, a leader in the marketing and virtual events space. BrightTALK said virtual event attendance has “high predictive value because IT buyers are making a material investment of their time to engage with vendor-produced content.”
The acquisition increases TechTarget’s universe of opted-in professionals. TechTarget already has over twenty million opted-in business contact records (mostly in technology positions from its 140 enterprise technology sites), and BrightTALK has eight million registered attendees on its media platform. There is likely to be some overlap in names, but having a second source of opted-in professionals increases the scope of measured intent across TechTarget, BrightTALK, and corporate websites (a KickFire OEM deal).
The acquisition offers substantial cross-selling opportunities in 2021 as vendors continue to focus on virtual events in lieu of face-to-face trade shows and conferences. Furthermore, “BrightTALK generates a large volume of valuable content in webinar and video format that is incremental to TechTarget’s current offerings. This content improves TechTarget’s potential ability to attract new users and diversifies the content available via TechTarget’s portfolio of web sites.”
And because both platforms are opted-in, the intent data does not need to be anonymized. TechTarget can deliver person-level intent data that includes contact information, articles read, webinar sessions viewed, potential competitors, and their stage in the buyer’s journey. What’s more, these rich intent datasets are GDPR-compliant across both platforms.
“TechTarget’s leadership position in the market is further strengthened by the acquisition of BrightTALK. This acquisition checks all the boxes. It allows us to increase our original content, grow our opt-in audience of registered members, and add a material amount of proprietary first-party purchase intent data. It’s a very powerful combination that will enhance our customers’ abilities to use our purchase intent data to grow their revenues and increase their market share.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
“We are excited to join forces with TechTarget. They are the leading provider of original expert content and distributor of vendor decision-support content in the B2B tech market, which has allowed them to develop the preeminent first-party purchase intent offering,” said BrightTALK CEO Paul Heald. “Combining our leading platform for online IT events is a winning combination.”
BrightTALK has over 1,000 customers who created 25,000 webinars and videos over the past year. The platform generates over 200,000 unique monthly viewers and six million annual content engagements.
BrightTALK also fits with TechTarget’s financial objectives. It is on track for $50 million in 2020 revenue, with approximately half this revenue under long-term contracts. TechTarget hit 35% in subscription revenue last quarter but has stated a 50% subscription revenue goal. With Priority Engine on track for approximately $50 million in 2020 subscription revenue and BrightTALK posting roughly $25 million, the combined pro forma company would generate $75 million in subscription revenues on $195 million in 2020 revenue (Q3 YTD + mid-point Q4 guidance + $50M BrightTALK estimate), or approximately 38 – 39% in contract-based revenue.
BrightTALK has also done well during the pandemic, with revenue on track to grow 30% this year. It added one million additional opted-in professionals over the past year.
The deal is priced at $150 million, a 3X multiple over projected 2020 earnings. The cash transaction will close before the end of the year.
BrightTALK has four offices in the US, two in the UK, and two in APAC (Sydney and Singapore). LinkedIn lists them with 275 employees, a headcount growth of 15% over the past year.
Dun & Bradstreet, which has long relied on global partnerships to address the sales, marketing, and risk evaluation needs of its multi-national customers, is expanding its presence in Europe with the acquisition of Bisnode Business Information Group. Bisnode is 70% owned by private equity firm Ratos and 30% by Bonnier.
The $818 million acquisition, which is 75% cash and 25% common stock, expands Dun & Bradstreet’s presence in Scandinavia, Central Europe, and D-A-CH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). The acquisition provides direct ownership in eighteen “strategic territories in Europe” and “provides opportunities for scale by leveraging existing Dun & Bradstreet product portfolio, data supply chain, and technology infrastructure.”
Upon close, Ratos will hold a 1% stake in Dun & Bradstreet.
Bisnode’s Belgian operations were not included in the deal.
The deal adds 110,000 Bisnode customers to Dun & Bradstreet’s customer base and provides direct access to an additional fifty Global 500 companies headquartered in the Bisnode countries. The deal provides direct ownership of 33 million business records (around nine percent of the WorldBase file). It also allows for the direct sale of Dun & Bradstreet products into major European markets.
Bisnode currently has an annual revenue of around $400 million, net income of $28 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $70 million.
Bisnode has been a Dun & Bradstreet reseller since 2003. Dun & Bradstreet’s solutions account for 33% of Bisnode revenue, and revenue has been “growing in a solid manner for the past few years” in the Bisnode territories. The remaining Bisnode revenue consists of proprietary in-market solutions.
“We are pleased to bring Bisnode into the Dun & Bradstreet family following a nearly two-decade strategic alliance. The powerful combination of our data, analytics, and innovative solutions, paired with Bisnode’s deep client relationships and expertise in European markets, will provide our existing and future clients with vital business intelligence to support their own growth ambitions. We look forward to welcoming the Bisnode team to Dun & Bradstreet and to working together to grow the global business.”
Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour
When the deal closes, Dun & Bradstreet will create an International Strategic Advisory Board headed by Neeraj Sahai, President of Dun & Bradstreet International. Ratos AB CEO Jonas Wiström will be joining the Advisory Board.
“Integrating our two leading organizations provides significant opportunity to deliver a broader product set to a substantially larger global client base. As the international business community becomes increasingly data-driven, we look forward to combining our teams to unlock further potential, drive innovation, and deliver solutions that are tuned to client and market needs,” said Sahai.
Email deliverability vendor Validity announced the global availability of Everest, a new platform for email optimization, analytics, and delivery. The platform combines the capabilities of 250ok, Return Path, and BriteVerify, businesses that they acquired over the past two years.
“Validity built Everest to give marketers everything they need to ensure email success,” promised the firm. “Everest is a complete email analytics platform powered by Validity’s exclusive data feeds, the largest data network in the industry, and widespread integration and support within the email ecosystem. It offers marketers a complete set of tools to prepare, test, optimize, and measure their email campaigns. With fully configurable dashboards, a highly intuitive user interface, and seamless integration with many of the leading email service providers, Everest makes it fast and easy to optimize campaigns.
Other features include performance tracking reports, customizable alerts, list hygiene, and campaign benchmarking versus competitors and global senders. Unique features include email certification for avoiding spam filters, View Time Optimization (VTO) for Verizon Media mailboxes, and enterprise-grade managed services.
Everest pre-send optimization features include form validation, bulk upload verification, and design and content tools. Emails are checked against over seventy device-mail clients. Email links and images are tested, and A/B testing is supported.
Competitive intelligence features include message samples, subject lines, sending volume, message patterns, and performance metrics. Everest also flags competitor list hygiene issues, authentication gaps, and blocklist history. “Beyond that, you’ll be able to compare brands side-by-side to identify low-hanging fruit and quick wins around sending volumes, accessibility, mobile compatibility, image animation, localization, and sending best practices.”
Verizon VTO delivers emails at the top of the inbox when the addressee is in her email client, quadrupling open rates and doubling click through rates for Yahoo, AOL, Verizon.net, and ATT.net mailboxes.
Everest “is, by a wide margin, the most comprehensive, insightful, value-add email platform ever offered in our industry,” said Validity CEO Mark Briggs. “Any business that relies on digital marketing should consider Everest as the key to delivering email success.”
