As part of the update to my Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors, I’m working my way through the product updates of nearly two dozen vendors. In most cases, this information is only available to non-users as press releases and blogs. But one of my profiled companies, SalesLoft, has a better way to communicate to its customers and prospects. Their VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester records a ninety second video for each release which includes a mini-demo and user benefits discussion.
These videos are short and professional with optional closed captioning and a full transcript. Furthermore, the videos are in plain English so that they can be easily understood by end users. You won’t hear the typical tech speak.
And videos that start, “Hey, Guys, Sean here with SalesLoft” help to reinforce the brand and convey a sense of friendliness and ease of use.
Here is a sample transcript:
Hey Guys, Sean here with SalesLoft. We are excited to announce the new SalesLoft platform UI.
Today we’re introducing a new look. You’ll see an updated platform design for SalesLoft. Inspired by the desire to deliver consistency, the new UI represents a simpler interface, standardizing all the pages within the platform.
We made changes to how users interact with the interface:
The simpler design puts more focus on the information that matters without changing how you navigate throughout the platform…
The SalesLoft community has evolved over the past few years, becoming the application of record for the specialized inside sales organization.
The updated UI reflects your feedback, making it easier to quickly execute your tasks in addition to laying a foundation for faster innovation and increased value delivery to you, our users.
Thank you for enabling SalesLoft to continue to serve you. As always, we are excited to hear your feedback!
What’s more, it is clear that they understand that meeting the needs of their customers drives their success.
The Salesforce Summer 2016 release contains over 200 new features and enhancements including Lightning support for Data.com and the Marketing Cloud, Wave Analytics for the Service Cloud, a native dialer, and SaleforceIQ Inbox for Outlook.
The Account Insights Tab provides integrated Data.com intelligence.
The Data.com Prospect Insights view is now Lightning enabled and can be accessed from Opportunity and Account Detail pages. A “See More Insights” button (1) takes the user to additional business and financial details from Dun & Bradstreet. Company intelligence includes D&B WorldBase firmographics and linkage, Hoover’s top company descriptions and competitors, and First Research industry overviews including call prep questions and industry summaries. Hoover’s and First Research content sets are also licensed from Dun & Bradstreet.
Clicking on Annual Revenue (2), provides additional details around revenue and growth.
Sales reps can further research the company by clicking on See More News (3).
According to the Summer 2016 release notes, “In Lightning Experience, Prospecting Insights give your reps highly relevant information that helps guide customer conversations. Account insights and company linkages are all in one location for a more efficient and customer focused experience.”
First Research industry overviews provide a set of plain-English primers. While there is some international discussion, the profiles are US-centric and directed towards non-experts (i.e. sales reps). Industry overview sections include:
Industry Details—View details about the accounts industry as identified by SIC and NAICS codes and descriptions.
Competitive Landscape—Understand the potential of the account in its related industry.
Trends—Understand the account’s financial situation and identify potential growth areas.
Opportunities—Peruse the various account opportunities.
Call Prep—Prepare for a call with detailed Q&A.
Industry Websites—Link to the websites of the account’s top competitors.
Data.com Lightning also includes the recently enhanced Company Hierarchy view. The family tree information mashes together the Dun & Bradstreet global family tree (e.g. linkages, location type, city, country, revenue, and employees) with Salesforce.com account intelligence including whether the location is already an account and the name of the account owner.
The Data.com company hierarchy is sourced from the highly respected D&B WorldBase file. SFDC has mashed together SFDC account intelligence with the family tree.
Users may expand or collapse nodes and quickly add an account via clicking on a Plus button.
Data.com Lightning also supports an Add New Account feature located on the Account page. The quick search feature supports filtering by Revenue, Country / Territory, State, Name or Website, Location Type (Headquarter, Branch, or Single Location). While reviewing the company list, users can mouse over a company name to see additional company details. Up to twenty accounts may be added at a time.
The Add New Account selects help filter through the very large universe of Dun & Bradstreet data but appears to be under-featured. Similar filters are available in company lookups in sales intelligence services, but they provide filters with counts that can be applied via a single click. They also provide one click sorting by clicking on headers and filtering by regions within countries (e.g. Provinces and Territories).
Last month, Data.com pricing was simplified to a single tier for Prospector and Clean. Thus, all Prospector and Clean users now have access to the full WorldBase file including company hierarchy, secondary industry codes, and broader financial details.
In Data.com Clean, Lead records are now enriched with the Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase file. The release notes state, “Even if your leads have only a name and email address, you can add a ton of valuable company information. That could be the difference between converting a lead and wasting your reps’ time.”
On the negative side, Data.com has retired its Social Keys which matched records with social profiles.
Other Features
Other new Summer 2016 features from Salesforce include
Lightning Voice: Click-to-dial and inbound call support native to SFDC
Email Studio: “an all-new, streamlined, intuitive email creation and send workflow” for the Marketing Cloud.
Lightning Pages: Configures new Lighting home pages by “dragging and dropping standard, custom, or partner” components on the page canvas.
Service Wave: Service analytics provide “visibility into KPIs like open cases, agent productivity, and customer satisfaction”
On Monday, I will touch upon SalesforceIQ enhancements in the Summer 2016 release.
Data.com Prospecting Insights Financial Details from Dun & Bradstreet.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Salesforce.com is evolving towards a System of Intelligence. At her Data.com Keynote at Dreamforce, VP of Product Marketing Michelle Huff noted that CRM has been evolving from a system of record to a system of engagement. This involves not only reducing data entry, but evolving CRM for mobile, social, and account maintenance. The next evolutionary step is becoming a system of intelligence which supports account planning, account awareness, and recommendations from within the CRM.
Historically, sales reps have conducted most of their account research outside of the CRM, but Data.com is adding additional Dun & Bradstreet datasets to deliver account intelligence within SFDC. These information sets move CRM from being a reactive tool for selling to a proactive tool for customer intelligence. Insights include account targets, task prioritization, and alerts.
At the base of customer intelligence is good data. If your system of record is out of date or filled with gaps, your insights will be limited or inaccurate. “intelligence just becomes less intelligent,” said Huff. “Recommendations will be great, but just not as helpful.” For example, leads will be passed to the wrong rep if sizing and industry data is missing.
According to Data.com Senior Director of Marketing Beth Fitzpatrick, data quality is the number one reason that CRM implementations fail. Data.com addresses this problem through both a Clean service for maintaining data quality and Prospector for list building and account planning. She also noted the value of a high quality referential data source such as the Dun & Bradstreet account file. “When you leverage the D-U-N-S Numbers as a kind of identifier across your system, it allows you to organize and structure that data…you have that index, kind of keeping things in order.”
Christoph Gerz, Director of Global Sales Operations at Polycom noted that after standardizing on Data.com, 90% of his pipeline is DUNSRight matched from a dollar perspective. Prior to Data.com, there was no standardization on company names and addresses. They also lacked firmographic and linkage data.
Jennifer Taylor, SVP of Product Development, began by stating, “we can’t create time for you, but we can create intelligence in our system that will hopefully make you more effective and more productive and enable you to cover more ground in less time.”
According to Data.com, the pillars of improved sales productive come from being able to
Discover the Best Opportunities
Prioritize Your Prospects
Understand Your Customers Better
I would argue that this list of requirements is too narrow and should also include
Monitor your Customers and Prospects Better
Sell Deeper into the Organization
Data.com has omitted these two as they do not offer significant monitoring, organizational research, or relationship management tools, though this weakness is beginning to change. The new SalesforceIQ for Sales addresses some of the relationship tools through its who knows who feature and email mining to prevent customer and prospect requests from slipping between the cracks. The addition of the Dun & Bradstreet family tree to Data.com in Winter 2016 (classic version only) is another step towards addressing these gaps.
Data.com has implemented a series of enhancements over the past year. Whereas it was a somewhat ignored platform for the prior few years, Salesforce has increased its investment in both content and functionality through an extension of the Dun & Bradstreet partnership:
“We have to ensure that you have a solid foundation of data, that that foundation of data continues to be enriched and stay clean. So we’re constantly expanding our data sets, improving our data quality, religiously helping you manage your dupes, providing you scalability so we grow as your business grows and then always making sure that everything we build, of course, is API first so you can integrate it into any workflow or process that you use within your system,” said Taylor.
Prospecting Insights was released this summer and provided broader business details, industry and competitive intelligence, and call prep questions. The extended company intelligence is from Dun & Bradstreet with the call prep content written by First Research editors and the competitors lists assembled by Hoover’s editors.
“One of the things we talk a lot about at Salesforce is customer love. The first step to love is knowledge…and Prospecting Insights aims to give you that intelligence.” — Jennifer Taylor, SVP of Product Development
Winter 2016 brings the Dun & Bradstreet family tree, Recommended Accounts (cloning your top customers), Lead Appending which adds firmographics to incoming leads, and Clean Enhancements including perpetual update and geocoding. All of these items are listed as beta or pilot in Winter 2016 so will hit general availability later in the year.
The Dun & Bradstreet family trees are global in scope and include location, sizing, and ownership type (e.g. Headquarters, Branch, Division).
The Dun & Bradstreet Family Tree (beta) supports one-click addition of new Account records.
If a location is currently within SFDC, a green flag is displayed along with the account owner’s name.
By scrolling over and clicking on any location, it is immediately added as an account and assigned to the rep.
Trees are collapsible at the node level so users can hide divisions that are of little interest.
They plan on additional features in future releases including white space analysis and performing account and opportunity analysis.
The Recommended Accounts feature is a black box prospecting engine that utilizes customer win / loss information to identify companies similar to the reps’ top customers. Data.com states that Recommended Accounts is “based on your past successes. Our algorithm learns from your Salesforce data to find accounts similar to those you have closed. Accounts are listed in ranked order, those at the top have the greatest possibility of success.” Reps can then filter the results to further refine the list (e.g. limit recommendations to headquarters) and then select proposed accounts to be added to SFDC with one click.
The description sounds fairly rudimentary as it basically looks at basic firmographic variables to find “good adjacent, highly probable opportunities.” It should not be confused with predictive analytics features that look at thousands of Business Signals matched against an Ideal Profile.
Lead enrichment provides web form enrichment based on two fields, name and email. Data.com then appends firmographics and phone information to the record based upon the email domain.
And since firmographics and linkage are derived from Dun & Bradstreet, leads are properly routed to the appropriate rep and the lead is given a quality and priority score.
Only a high level slide was provided on their roadmap, but it included market analysis, customer analysis, news, financials, account prioritization, and significant event alerts. Several of last year’s announcements went unremarked including the Thomson Reuters partnership and third party services (Data.com Connect and the Data.com Exchange). The third party services no longer appear to have their own mini-site with Data.com sending customers and prospects to the Data Apps on the AppExchange.
For a long time, Data.com was simply the Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase file sold by SFDC reps. It was strong on brand but weak on content and functionality. It now appears that Salesforce is getting serious about Data.com.
As part of the update to my Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors, I’m working my way through the product updates of nearly two dozen vendors. In most cases, this information is only available to non-users as press releases and blogs. But one of my profiled companies, SalesLoft, has a better way to communicate to its customers and prospects. Their VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester records a ninety second video for each release which includes a mini-demo and user benefits discussion.
