Tag: Pricing

SalesIntel Unlimited Credits

B2B DaaS vendor SalesIntel shifted away from credit-based data pricing to unlimited data access to its firmographics, technographics, contacts (including emails and direct dials), and news alert intelligence.  Pricing is based on the number of users, with unlimited access to downloads, exports, and data enrichment.

”SalesIntel’s unlimited everything plan removes the friction, frustration, and predatory pricing so many customers experience when working with other B2B data providers.” comments SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “We are proud to be a true partner to this industry by leading a pricing revolution that will help go-to-market teams build limitless pipeline.”

SalesIntel’s unlimited content includes:

  • 300 million unique technology installs across 22 million accounts.  Technographics span 18,000 technologies.
  • 100 million email-verified contacts.  Of these, over 17 million are maintained by SalesIntel editors and regularly reverified to maintain a 95% accuracy level.
  • B2B account news and alerts for 22 million companies organized into 32 categories.

Contracts include the RevDriver Chrome extension, Bombora intent data, and platform integrations (e.g., Salesforce, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, Marketo).

Licenses also include access to SalesIntel’s Research-on-Demand editors for finding new contacts or reverifying contact information.  Research on Demand is subject to credits, but at 120 per seat, the cap is generous.

SalesIntel has simplified pricing based on the number of seats.

Under credit-based pricing models, “Marketing is worried about not having enough credits for campaigns, Sales is worried about not having enough credits to effectively prospect, and RevOps is worried that there won’t be enough credits to keep all this data clean.”

Removing credit-based pricing offers several benefits to customers: 

  • Budgeting is simplified as the total cost of a SalesIntel contract is known when the contract is signed.  RevTech teams do not need to create mid-year POs if credits are running low or additional marketing campaigns are planned. 
  • RevOps does not need to allocate and monitor credits across multiple teams or reallocate a dwindling set of credits at the end of the year.
  • Marketing can run enrichment, including visitor enrichment, and updates as frequently as they’d like, limiting the impact of data decay on their account, contact, and lead data.
  • Marketing can regularly analyze and expand its ICP and test new verticals without worrying about credits.
  • Sales Reps can research and sync key contacts to their SEP or CRM without worrying about using up their allotted credits halfway through the year.

Furthermore, SalesIntel does not include any “data destroy” clauses, a legal issue that some incumbent vendors employ to increase the cost to defectors.

CMO James Lamberti explained to GZ Consulting that credit-based pricing “becomes a barrier to value for the customer,” with customers feeling “trapped” by usage limits.  “We want people to begin to appreciate the full depth and breadth of our data and to leverage it in ways to make themselves more efficient.”

Ramnani argued that SalesIntel customers enjoy value via “three very simple steps:

  1. We help them identify their ICP using the intelligence from our firmographic and technographic data.
  2. Then, we apply the intelligence of news and intent data to see who from their ICP is in the market today.
  3. Within those in-market companies, our customers enjoy direct conversations using mobile phones and direct dials.”

However, “context is everything.”  Vendors that provide large contact sets without the context of an ICP, account news, and intent data (i.e., steps 1 and 2) are providing names and numbers but fostering inefficiency in their go-to-market.  Targeting is more than simply finding many names.  Revenue teams need to know whom to call, when to call, and what to say.

SalesIntel can offer unlimited data access because it owns all of its data except for Bombora’s intent file.

Historically, Sales Intelligence services offered seat-based pricing, and marketing data vendors provided volume-based pricing.  When services began serving both departments, credit-based models were crafted on top of seat-based pricing, creating complex and frustrating pricing.  SalesIntel is looking to return to simple pricing and “partner with the industry” based on “the value of our data and the quality of our software,” argued Lamberti.

Lamberti described the sweet spot for this model as the mid-market – firms between 40 and 50 employees and several hundred.  These firms have some maturity in their marketing stack and go-to-market motion, with multiple BDRs and sellers.

However, “if you’re just a ten-person team with one seller and one BDR, we’ll certainly do business.  We’re going to have a package for them.  But the unlimited package is really so that we can go after the market where we really are a great fit, where we win.”

“Strategically, we know that this is the time to strike.  We’re not VC-backed.  This is where Manoj has got the right [employee-shareholder] strategy,” argued Lamberti.  The firm is not subject to the financial pressure of outside equity investors or public markets.  Thus, the new pricing is designed strategically “to gain share and grow our market footprint dramatically.” SalesIntel contracts are annual with multi-year discounts.  Pricing starts at around $11,000, with additional seats priced at $1,200.  Current customers that renew early can convert to the new pricing structure.

Vainu’s Nordic Coverage

Vainu’s Nordic Coverage

Scandinavian Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu released a new platform for its Swedish and Finnish databases.  The new platform includes expanded datasets, CRM connectors, usage-based pricing, and an updated UX.

Customers can migrate to the new platform or stay on the old one near-term.  However, future development will only be made for the new one.

The new platform offers a “simplified and unified” UX to “better represent what we offer clients: Actionable and reliable business data,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang.  Changes include a simplified prospecting module for Norway and Sweden and updated profile displays.

The platform includes a new filter architecture that will allow Vainu to “develop new filters in the UI faster as our databases expand with new data sets without compromising the platform’s speed or usability.”

Users can now define custom table layouts for reports which are reflected in the product and when downloading tables.  Users control which fields to display and their order.  In addition, Vainu added a JSON download format.

Vainu’s updated Build a List UX.

As the new platform pricing is usage-based, it includes a usage dashboard that tracks records downloaded and CRM account records matched.

While the old platform supported 400 financial variables, they were “incoherent and unmaintained fields, with duplicates, poor documentation, and poor naming.”  The new standardized financials display “100 carefully picked financial terms,” and financials are segmented for improved display and navigation.

Along with field display, the reports include definitions, making it easier to understand KPIs and how fields are calculated and rolled up.

To help with customer outreach, Vainu added 26,000 GDPR-compliant, human-verified contacts for Finland and Sweden.  Contact records include title, phone number, email, and LinkedIn handle.  Contacts were collected for firms with at least 10M€ (Finland) or 100MSEK (Sweden) in turnover.

Scandinavian Business ID connectors are available for Salesforce, MSD 365, HubSpot, and Pipedrive.  Global Domain-based connectors support Salesforce and HubSpot.

Bang noted that some customers and prospects had found Vainu to be a “significant financial commitment.”  The new usage-based pricing model “helps alleviate this worry” as it “lowers the barrier to entry for trying out data.”

SMB Pricing for one of the Nordic country databases begins at 4,200€ per annum with a 750€ onboarding fee.  The Team level supports one user and includes data updates and workflow triggers for 1,000 accounts.  The Business edition is similar but supports 8,000 updated accounts with triggers for 9,900€.

The Global Business database, which is domain-based, supports up to 10,000 company exports or enrichments and provides full access to the global database.  The Global Database is priced at 12,000€, with each band of 10,000 additional enrichments priced at 1,000€.

Vainu has shifted to a usage-based pricing model that monitors the number of downloaded and enriched records.

Resources

Mmojo Data Marketplace Launched (Part III)

Mmojo Data Manager Portfolio View
Mmojo Data Manager Portfolio View

This is part III of my Mmojo coverage.  Part 1 covered data enrichment and part II covered prospecting.  My final blog covers Mmojo’s data partners and pricing model.

Both prospecting and uploaded lists may be appended via the Mmojo data marketplace.  While basic company firmographics are included with the subscription, additional data sets may be appended, some for a fee:

  • Contacts: Contact Function, Level, Title, Email, Direct Dial, Social Links.  Licensed from multiple partners.  Only Stirista has been disclosed so far.
  • Technographics: Aberdeen high-level budget figures, hardware counts (e.g. servers, laptops, printers), IT headcounts, installed technology
  • Extended Firmographics: Geolocation, Alternate Names, Parent Company, Phone
  • Extended Address Data: Secondary Addresses, Carrier Routes, Census Data, Congressional Seat
  • M&A Activity: X8 M&A Activity Index Score
  • Company Classification and Growth Indicators
  • Legal Entity Identifier (free)
  • Public Company Financials: US SEC (free)
  • Taxpayer Data: IRS by City or State (free)
  • National [Medical] Provider ID: CMS (free)
  • Social Security Data by ZIP: US SSA (free)

Premium data set descriptions are provided which include the list coverage rate, update frequency, refresh period (how long licensed without paying for the record again), price per record, fields, and column definitions.

Unlike other firms which treat their company identifiers as proprietary, Mmojo will be open sourcing their ExC company identifiers.  Currently, Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S Numbers serve as the de facto global company identifier, but Mmojo will be challenging that status next year when they roll out international company profiles with open sourced ids.

The ExC numbers also support list appends and merging.

“Once appended, users can view their contacts and associated contact analytics.  The analytics enable Mmojo users to detect gaps by showing total number of contacts, percentage of companies with contacts, and the distribution of contacts by function and title, providing key data intelligence to B2B and SMB sales and marketing organizations.”

  • CEO Hank Weghorst

Members of the Austin-based Mmojo team include several former members of the Avention product team including CEO Hank Weghorst, Chief Data Officer Brad Palmer, and CTO Ray Renteria.  While there are some broad stroke similarities between the platforms, Avention never offered a data mart service.

Mmojo does not yet provide marketing automation or CRM connectors, so marketers must upload and download CSV files between Mmojo and these other platforms.

Mmojo is priced at $95 per month with additional charges for premium datasets.  The base service includes support for up to 250,000 unique companies under management, basic company and contact enrichment, and list prospecting.  Credit card and ACH billing are supported.  Premium data may be purchased in blocks of credits as follows:

Premium datasets are priced differently with contacts being 10 credits per record and technographics 16 credits per record.
Premium datasets are priced differently with contacts being 10 credits per record and technographics 16 credits per record.

Pricing varies by record type.  For example, Mmojo contacts are priced at 10 credits per record, but Aberdeen technographics are priced at 16 credits per record.  Thus, Aberdeen appends are priced between $0.112 and $0.16 per record.

Contracts may be canceled at any point.

Mmojo tracks which records have been previously downloaded and does not charge again for a record if it is being downloaded within a refresh window (six months for most vendors).  Users are only charged for premium data downloads.

An Enterprise service option is available for firms requiring multiple seats, more than 250,000 managed records, or custom configurations.

Mmojo is offering free ten-day trials.  Trialers have view-only access to the tool and do not need to provide payment details during the trial.  When lists are shared with non-users, they are also eligible for ten day trials.

The service includes a set of context sensitive help tools and videos.  A customer forum is also available for asking questions.

This is one of the most mature product launches I have seen.  The service includes a broad set of functionality, clean user interface, deep content partnerships, complete help and training tools, and a full press page.  When discussing the product pre-launch with Weghorst, there was a clear product positioning and defined target market segment.  The service also offers unique product pricing (hybrid subscription with premium data sets) and business models.

Data.com: Price Reduction & Product Line Simplification

The Data.com Corporate Hierarchy Viewer displays the Dun & Bradstreet family tree. Users can add any location as an account. The tree also shows sizing variables and SFDC account owners.
The Data.com Corporate Hierarchy Viewer displays the Dun & Bradstreet family tree. Users can add any location as an account. The tree also shows sizing variables and SFDC account owners.

Data.com has simplified its pricing from two tiers to a single tier for both its sales intelligence Prospector service and its data hygiene Clean offering.   All Prospector users now receive the full Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase record for $150 per seat per month.  The full Dun & Bradstreet file was previously priced at $165 per seat per month as part of the Premium offering.  Corporate users will see the price rise from $125 to $150 but will receive the following additional content and capabilities due to the product unification:

  • Corporate family linkages with domestic and global ultimate parents
  • Corporate family hierarchy viewer
  • Up to six total SIC/NAICS industry classification codes
  • Account tradestyle (Doing Business As)
  • Account delinquency risk (High/Medium/Low)
  • Account latitude and longitude
  • Hoover’s First Research call prep content for imported and matched company records
  • Additional Hoover’s data/content, including Net Income, Industry Opportunities and Competitive Landscape

Users are still limited to 300 uploaded or downloaded records per user per month.  Additional records are priced at $0.65 per record, unchanged from the previous premium offering.  Data.com counts both company and contact records towards the monthly limit.  Additional download record credits are not subject to monthly usage limits and may be allocated to Prospector accounts at the Salesforce Administrator’s discretion.

The Clean service price is now $25 per user per month for all users in the instance.  All Clean users now receive the full WorldBase file.  By standardizing clean to a single edition, Data.com has reduced the price of Clean Premium from $35 to $25.

Simplifying the product bundles makes sense.  For premium users, there is a small price cut while there is a price rise for corporate users of Prospector but not Clean.  As a premium to Salesforce, having two Data.com editions probably complicated sales discussions unnecessarily.

Lowering the price of Clean also makes sense as higher data quality raises the overall value of the CRM for sales, marketing, and support.  Marketing enjoys better segmentation and targeting while sales benefits from improved company intelligence for qualification and fewer misrouted leads.  Sales and support also benefit from the better population of contact information (e.g. direct dials, phones) and flags when an individual is no longer affiliated with the account.

While the price reduction makes Prospector more competitive with other Sales Intelligence solutions, Prospector remains at the upper end of the market.  For example, InsideView for CRM is priced at $995 per annum, 44% below the price of Data.com Prospector.

GIGO: Did We Lose on Price Again?

Loss Reason

Steve Silver, a Research Assistant at Sirius Decisions, recently blogged about a client where the overwhelming reason for losing deals was price.  But the client had a differentiated service where price should not have been the primary factor.

Silver discovered the reasons for this anomaly:  The field was not used by any departments at the firm.  Without an owner, the path of least resistance was selected — the first choice in the picklist.  And in the case of the client, 90% of the losses were flagged as price-based.

Did we establish value?

Silver omitted a third reason, and one which is common amongst sales reps.  Price is an easy scapegoat for lost opportunities.  But if your service is well differentiated and you focus on your value proposition, price should not be the primary loss driver.  Yes, some deals will be lost because a competitor low balls the deal (a true price loss), or the prospect simply does not have the financial means to purchase your service (a poorly qualified prospect), but in most cases, losing on price is a failure on the part of sales reps.  If they thought about it more, they would realize that price is not an exogenous variable outside of their control.  That’s because price is tied to value.  Price is the critical variable if your value has not been established.

This isn’t to say that pricing could be wrong.  If your competitors are quickly moving up the value curve, your historical price may no longer be sustainable as you become less well differentiated.  With good data and analytics, you would capture this shift in the competitive marketplace and act accordingly (e.g. R&D to better differentiate your service, better product bundling, or reduced prices), but price should only dominate the loss reasons in a commodity business.

GIGO

So what else could be gleaned from this situation?  First, somebody needs to own data quality within the CRM.  If a field is viewed as busywork, your sales reps will populate it with junk data.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

Managers should also be pushing back on reps to better understand why deals were lost so that mistakes can be avoided in the future.  Does the sales rep need additional training or coaching?  Are additional sales tools needed for competitor handling or establishing value?  Are we poorly qualifying opportunities or failing to identify the key decision makers?

Yes, it is easier to move onto the next deal without taking the time to analyze deal losses; but a learning organization needs to understand its failure points.

Sales Operations

Sales Operations should be cross-checking fields.  If the loss reason is price or features, then a competitor had a better offering.  Was the primary competitor recorded in the CRM?  If the competitor is blank, then additional explanation should be required.  Did you really lose on price or features if you don’t know who the competitor was?

Or did you lose to no decision or the incumbent because there was insufficient value established to warrant funding the purchase or sustaining the switching costs?

If you don’t collect the data or you allow a field to be treated as busywork, it won’t be available for analysis.  I have had several instances where my clients did not record the loss reason or the competitors.  I have also had others where the fields were usually blank.  In short, the firms were operating in a competitive fog and not using their CRM for market monitoring.

In the end, it is important to not only gather win/loss information, but to use the data for sales training and coaching, marketing communications, sales enablement, and product development.  When information is valued by the organization, then sales reps are less likely to blithely skip fields or enter the first field in the required picklist.

Pricing Transparency (or Lack of It) in Martech

RJMetrics: % of Companies w/Public Pricing by Landscape
RJMetrics: % of Companies w/Public Pricing by Landscape

Back in July, Fliptop was criticizing its competitors in the predictive analytics space for lack of pricing transparency.  Their competitors (Lattice Engines and Mintigo) responded that their products were simply too complex to post prices publicly; Fliptop was a simpler offering targeting the SMB space.

A few weeks later, Fliptop again went on the offensive noting their usability stating “Fliptop has done away with the Wizard of Oz approach to predictive analytics taken by most predictive vendors (‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’).”

It was all shaping up to be an interesting case of marketing jujitsu until LinkedIn stepped in and bought Fliptop for its talent.

I mentioned this anecdote because it fit perfectly with a recent study by Robert J Moore of RJMetrics that analyzed pricing transparency in the martech space.  Moore found that only forty percent of marketing technology companies post pricing on their website.  According to Moore, “companies justify their lack of public pricing based on solution complexity — there are too many factors, they say, that go into a price.  These solutions instead offer demos or ‘contact us’ forms.”

Backbone services such as CRM, marketing automation, and ecommerce are most likely to post pricing while middleware services such as data management, tag management, and identity management are the least likely to provide details.

Companies with freemium models are much more likely to provide pricing, but only 16% of the martech firms offered a free baseline service.

Moore found that companies with freemium models are more likely to have a lower paid first tier than companies that eschew freemium pricing.  Non-freemium vendors generally have their lowest tier pricing 2X to 5X that of freemium vendors.  Freemium vendors averaged $100 per month for their lowest tier while non-freemium vendors were slightly above $250 per month.

If you’re a vendor and want to quote pricing publicly, the data is clear: most of your competitors are quoting in monthly terms. And they’re probably doing it for a reason.
– Robert J Moore of RJ Metrics

Moore also found that monthly pricing dominates with fewer than 15% of companies advertising annual or one-time prices.  The dominance of monthly pricing held across all five martech sectors.  As Moore noted, this pricing is for vendors with transparent pricing; annual pricing is much more likely to be quoted by non-pricing transparent vendors when assembling a detailed quote.

The study was based upon the 1,876 company Marketing Technology Landscape put together by Scott Brinker.  RJMetrics employed Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to collect the data.