Technology Sales Intelligence vendor RainKing began the new year by rolling out a set of enhancements to their native Salesforce.com connector. RainKing focused on incorporating their Inside Scoops (Technology Sales Triggers) into the AppExchange service. New functionality includes searching for recent Scoops within SFDC and building a list of contacts at a company. RainKing also incorporated saved searches and Groups into RainKing for Salesforce.
“The more you can work in one platform while leveraging your other sales tools, the more you can focus on your number one priority: selling,” said RainKing Director of Product Management Mark Sapiano. “RainKing’s daily Inside Scoops are invaluable to anyone who wants to beat their competition to the negotiating table.”
RainKing’s Inside Scoops are now displayed within SFDC.
When the user finds an actionable Scoop, she clicks on the “Find the Best Contacts” button and receives a list of account contacts ordered by relevance to the Scoop. RainKing’s ranking function is able to determine the most likely contacts to be working on a project based upon responsibilities and the nature of the Scoop. Sales reps can also apply filters to the contacts (e.g. match strength, management level, job title, keyword) in order to hone the list and select contacts for upload as Salesforce Leads or Contacts. The system also generates an SFDC task and populates it with the Scoop information for reference.
RainKing finds the most likely contacts at a prospect to be overseeing or working an Inside Scoop project.
Furthermore, RainKing added an Inside Scoops custom object which displays imported Scoops and associated Leads or Contacts.
Inside Scoops (projects and opportunities) are gathered via direct interviews and updated during subsequent calls. Thus, if a project has selected some of the vendors or hit roadblocks, the additional intelligence is gathered and the Scoop is labeled as updated. Over 1,500 Inside Scoops are gathered per day, tagged to over 70 Scoop Topics and nine Scoop Types. Scoop Topics include Contracts, Technology Updates, Marketing, Pain Point, Project, Spending Trend, Management Changes, and Staffing.
RainKing also ported over their Saved Searches and Group functionality so that users do not need to rekey search filters and parameters. These shared parameters are displayed in the RainKing Search Home Page within Salesforce. According to Sapiano, “You can even run saved searches and groups straight from Salesforce and import the results directly into Salesforce – all without having to login to RainKing first.”
Saved Searches are now available from the RainKing Search tab Home Page.
Finally, RainKing streamlined the record import process “making it more intuitive and flexible.” Workflow improvements include custom tags and an additional duplicate detection step.
Artesian opened an office in Boston and launched a US / Canadian edition of their Social Selling service.
Over the past week, I’ve been discussing how the fourteen vendors in my new 2017 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors have improved their products. I broke this discussion into four categories:
Functionality: How are the sales and marketing functions able to leverage the content within these offerings?
User Interface: What have the firms done to improve the presentation and workflow of their products?
Connectors: Which integrations were updated? Which ones were launched? These spanned CRMs, MAPs, Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) platforms, APIs, and Google Chrome.
So far, this framework has only looked at existing products and services. This blog addresses the final question: What new Sales Intelligence products and services were launched in 2016?
Sales Focused Products
Artesian launched the US edition of their sales intelligence offering in 2016. The firm also opened an office in Boston.
DiscoverOrg launched the TiLT certification program for sales development reps and marketers. The program is available at no charge to current clients and provides “microburst” learning with videos, curated content, and challenge tasks.
In early 2016 they announced their Technology, Engineering, Development, and Design (TEDD) offering which focuses on product management and engineering. In H2 2016, DiscoverOrg rolled out datasets for Sales (50,000 new contacts), Fortune 1000 CxOs (30,000 new contacts), and HR (80,000 new contacts) bringing the overall database coverage to one million executives at the end of Q3.
RainKing rolled out a global enterprises dataset with coverage of AsiaPac, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
InsideView launched Tech Profiler in 2016. This add-on dataset provides technology profiles within InsideView Sales and can be used as a filter when building lists with Target. The technology information is also available via API and InsideView’s Professional Services. The API offers two new calls: retrieve technology implemented at a company and retrieve companies that have deployed specific technologies.
The dataset provides information about technologies used by InsideView’s top 525,000 global companies. It covers more than 2,600 front-end and back-end technologies in more than 100 categories. InsideView did not disclose whether they collected the technology file themselves or licensed it from another vendor.
Salesgenie Team provides a set of team tools to Salesgenie. New features include lead assignment rules, add messages to leads, customer cloning, and tracking and reporting tools. A new My Leads list displays assigned leads while a Sales Pipeline report provides team member analytics.
Infofree introduced a lower priced version of its service called SalesFlower which removes several features including background checks, business credit reports, CustomerCloner, and the CRM101 SFA platform.
Owler introduced an enterprise API service for calling corporate firmographics, competitors, and news.
Marketing Focused Products
Hoover’s added a trio of Concierge Services to its Hoover’s product line which target SMBs with revenue up to $250 million. Hoover’s is providing three related services:
Targeted List Building – Identifies prospects similar to a client’s best customers.
Effective Email Marketing – Delivers email services including messaging, design, email coding, blasting, and testing. Dun & Bradstreet also supports email verification, analytics, and unsubscribe / bounce management. Landing site hosting is provided via an undisclosed partner.
Optimized Customer Data – Supports data cleansing, standardization, and data enrichment for customer company and contact files.
Avention’sOneSource DataVision is a hosted platform which consolidates and cleanses multiple customer data sources, integrating internal and external customer intelligence. By matching Avention company and contact data against customer and prospect files, Avention improves the accuracy and firmographic fill rates of marketing databases. The result is a unified view of customer data for accurate customer segmentation and targeting based upon enriched data from Avention’s Global Content Live database.
OneSource DataVision also provides analytics and visualization tools for marketers. “As a result, you will be able to identify and leverage key customer and prospect segments to make more informed decisions, identify cross-sell opportunities, key industries, verticals and much more,” states Avention.
OneSource DataVision includes a gap analysis tool which assesses the total addressable market in order to identify underserved markets and growth potential. After enriching and segmenting the data, OneSource DataVision users can prospect for similar companies.
OneSource DataVision, along with the flagship OneSource platform, form the OneSource ABM Solution, also launched in 2016. This solution ensures sales and marketing teams are aligned around the right accounts to target, then provides the deep insights needed to create account plans, and targeted sales messages and content.
Zoominfo repackaged its service as the Zoominfo Growth Acceleration Platform for sales and marketing effectiveness. The new platform helps sales and marketing teams “identify, connect, and engage with qualified prospects and replicate success.” The Growth Acceleration Platform is a cross-product branding that supports company and executive searching, list building, file enrichment, and data Insights (segmentation analysis and persona identification). Other tools include a Salesforce.com connector, web form enrichment (FormComplete), and a new Google Chrome Extension called ReachOut which provides quick access to contact information from Zoominfo and LinkedIn contact profiles.
InsideView Refresh was launched as a new product in 2016. Refresh provides automated account cleansing within CRM. It’s currently available for Salesforce CRM.
InsideView also launched an ABM solution in partnership with Marketo. It’s a bundle that includes products and data services to enable targeted account and contact selection, campaign execution, and measurement.
In H2 2016, DiscoverOrg launched an Enhanced ABM Toolkit which builds an ideal customer profile and then identifies similar companies. Users upload a file of their best customers which is matched against the DiscoverOrg database. The system then performs firmographic and technographic segmentation analysis and then suggests similar companies.
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In 2016, the focus of the established sales intelligence companies was on extending their services into the marketing department and aligning their positioning around Account Based Marketing. On the sales side, their were fewer new products or major functional enhancements. Instead, they focused on expanded content and workflow improvements. This strategy was best exemplified by Avention and InsideView. Both firms doubled their company and contact universes, improved their user interfaces, and launched additional marketing products and connectors. However, they added little new functionality to their sales products.
Five years ago, the sales intelligence services were firmly planted in the sales department with some also providing services for analysts. Now, however, the marketing department is receiving equal or greater capital investment as firms look to support “sales and marketing alignment” with CRM and MAP connectors which leverage a common reference data set.
In 2017 I anticipate additional product announcements with ABM positioning across the revenue lifecycle. The Sales Intelligence companies realize that if they establish themselves in the marketing department with a broad set of services, then their position within the sales department will be less subject to churn.
Avention offers OneSource for CRM connectors for SFDC, MS Dynamics, and Oracle for Sales Cloud (Oracle connector shown)
Continuing on my discussion of Sales Intelligence enhancements in 2016, my next area of coverage is connectors which extend functionality into CRMs, MAPs, Google Chrome, etc.
Almost all Sales Intelligence vendors offer Salesforce.com connectivity as a baseline offering. Some have limited functionality while others provide a fully integrated offering encompassing virtually all of their website features along with update features (e.g. Batch, continuous, “stare and compare”).
The following vendors launched or enhanced their CRM connectors:
Zoominfo released a new version of Zoominfo for Salesforce in February 2016. Features include on-demand updating, new contact matching, segmentation analysis, and new targeted contacts. Zoominfo stresses that all enrichment, analysis, and targeting are done via “one easy-to-use interface” without the need to export files to Excel. Zoominfo for Salesforce also added integrated prospecting. Data may be shared bi-directionally between the services so users can check for duplicates before uploading prospects to SFDC. Zoominfo also added custom mappings for all fields into its Salesforce connector and improved the company and contact lookup workflows.
Avention released OneSource for MS Dynamics and OneSource for Oracle Sales Cloud connectors which integrate Avention functionality into the Microsoft and Oracle CRMs. Features include I-frame display, “stare and compare” updates, custom variables, prospecting, and the Avention Journal. Avention also rolled a series of enhancements into its CRM connectors. These include:
The automatic population of matched records, bypassing the “stare and compare” step for new accounts
Avention Journal filtering
Avention Journal list views (the default view is calendared)
Modify the Avention Journal viewing period
Contact filtering by job function, level, title, keyword, etc.
News filtering
DataVision tab (if licensed)
Salesforce Lightning support providing improved tablet usability and dynamic resizing.
Batch duplicate management on bulk uploads (ignore, create, update)
Data.com added a Prospect Insights view which can be accessed from Opportunity and Account Detail pages. A “See More Insights” button 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. Data.com also upgraded the Dun & Bradstreet company family view to the Lightning platform.
DiscoverOrg released CRM connectors for Talent Rover, Zoho, and Bullhorn. They also enhanced their Salesforce connector.
InsideView redesigned its Salesforce.com AppExchange user interface and launched Refresh which provides automated account cleansing within Salesforce.com.
To improve the Salesforce experience, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is no longer requiring sales reps to manually identify which contacts should be downloaded from SFDC to Sales Navigator. Synchronization can be managed at the administrator level. While SFDC describes this as improved synchronization, it basically downloads leads and accounts to Sales Navigator. No LinkedIn member account or lead intelligence is uploaded or available for updating SFDC records. However, the system does flag which records are in SFDC so that reps can manually key information from LinkedIn to SFDC. For example, sales reps may add tags (e.g. Qualified) and notes to leads and accounts with this information then synched with Salesforce.
Artesian redesigned its Salesforce and MS Dynamics connectors. Among the new features are sales trigger filtering by topic and trigger sharing by email, social media, and Chatter.
One of the major trends in 2016 was the continued expansion of sales intelligence vendors into the marketing department. Most commonly, this involved Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) connectors with Marketo and Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud), though some vendors support other MAPs as well.
InsideView released an ABM solution in partnership with Marketo. The ABM solution is a bundle that includes products and data services to enable targeted account and contact selection, campaign execution, and measurement.
RainKing released connectors for Pardot and NetSuite
Avention released connectors for Oracle Marketing (Eloqua) and Marketo which support data enrichment, account insights, and predictive analytics. The new MAP connectors support three marketing use cases: web form enrichment, uploaded list matching via the OneSource platform, and prospect list building within OneSource. Lists built and enriched within OneSource are then fed to Eloqua or Marketo.
Several vendors built Chrome connectors in late 2015 or early 2016. Chrome connectors build additional feature functionality into the Chrome browser, usually centering around the contextual display of company and contact information related to corporate websites and LinkedIn profiles. Firms with Chrome Connectors include DataFox, Mattermark, Zoominfo, DiscoverOrg, and HG Data.
To assist with messaging, LinkedIn now offers a Chrome extension for Gmail. The extension provides integrated access to public LinkedIn profiles and social contact information as a right-handed information bar. If a contact is not in Sales Navigator, users can quickly add him or her as a lead without exiting the Inbox. Icebreakers such as shared connections, experiences, and interests help shape account or prospect messaging. TeamLink colleague connections are also displayed.
Finally, several Sales Intelligence vendors began supporting Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) vendors (there are also non-SI vendors participating in ABSD ecosystems providing coaching, transcription, analytics, and other services):
DiscoverOrg: SalesLoft, Outreach, Tellwise
Owler: Outreach, SalesLoft
InsideView: KiteDesk, Quota Factory, SalesLoft
Zoominfo: KiteDesk
D&B NetProspex: KiteDesk
The Owler news feed is now displayed within SaleLoft allowing sales development reps to quickly customize their messaging.
There are two approaches to UI enhancements: Big Bang and Incremental. With the big bang approach the entire product is refreshed. Such a project is a major endeavor and often involves a completely new look and feel to the service and upgraded workflows and design elements. It may also involve new standards such as responsive design in support of mobile devices.
Big Bang
One example of broad product redesigns are the new interfaces found in Bureau van Dijk’sOrbis and Fame products. These products focus on financial analysis and account research. New design elements included a navigation bar, a contemporary UI, faster list building, new report types, shared information sets (e.g. reports, lists searches), and new analytical tools.
Unfortunately,Bureau van Dijk has not indicated any plans for addressing the old-fashioned Mint sales intelligence user interface.
Another example of redesign is InsideView which refreshed its user interface for its web browser and CRM connectors. The browser changes were relatively minor, but the CRM connectors had a broader set of design and workflow upgrades.
DiscoverOrg also redesigned their user interface at the beginning of 2016 (it was in beta in 2015). In February 2016, DiscoverOrg released a new platform designed with better speed, performance, and scalability. It included a new UI and enhanced features:
Streamlined prospecting against 62 variables across five broad categories: companies, employees, technology products, location, and triggers. The new UI immediately presents an updated result list as variables are selected. The same selects are available across three results views: companies, contacts, and triggers.
Export of contacts as profiles or as VCF
Company and contact notes
Suppression of companies or contacts when prospecting (e.g. suppress named accounts from lists for territory reps).
Admin user management and usage reporting
Ability to toggle between multiple departments on the same page (depending on subscription)
Ability to follow a company or contact with update alerting, including if they leave a company and reappear in the database under another profiled company (a unique DiscoverOrg capability)
Customizable dashboard based on followed lists
Contact profiles include previous job history and education
Company profiles include lists of current employees and recently departed staff.
RainKing went through a rebranding exercise which included a refreshed user interface. The platform has faster response times, improved searching, and an expanded technology taxonomy.
Zoominfo repackaged its service as the Zoominfo Growth Acceleration Platform for sales and marketing effectiveness. The new platform helps sales and marketing teams “identify, connect, and engage with qualified prospects and replicate success.” The Growth Acceleration Platform is a cross-product branding that supports company and executive searching, list building, file enrichment, and data Insights (segmentation analysis and persona identification).
Incremental
The second approach is more incremental. Instead of changing the overall look and feel of the platform, workflow and layout improvements are made to a set of contained tools. For example, list building is a contained functional category. Upgrades to prospecting workflows do not impact the whole product, but are focused in a functional subset, allowing the upgrades to be compartmentalized.
Avention took an incremental approach to workflow with redesigns of their active homepage, build a list, and watchlists. The Build a List user interface was redesigned to improve usability while expanding to 150 selects. Lists may now be exported to Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Oracle for Sales, Marketo, and Eloqua. New list management features include rename, pin to desktop, delete, modify criteria, and clone list.
The Avention active home page is now customizable with users able to drag and drop information tiles. There is also an improved SmartList tile display and onboarding tiles containing product tips.
Expanded notification functionality allows Avention reps to manage new company and sales trigger alerts from a centralized location. This Watchlist supports filtering by read/unread notices, priority flag, trigger type, and list. A new flag allows users to flag notifications as important.
Likewise, Data.com originally launched the Dun & Bradstreet family trees in the classic UI, but implemented the Lightning UI for family tree viewing. 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. Users may expand or collapse nodes and add an account via clicking on a Plus button.
Owler improved the user interface for their advanced search (Build a List). They also added selects for area code and ZIP/Postal Code.
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Unlike content and functional upgrades, one would not want to have annual UI upgrades as they require customers to relearn key elements of the service. There is value to both stability and change (a fact which is true of both product design and life in general). If a platform goes too long without a refresh, it becomes stale and fails to leverage new browser and mobile device capabilities. Furthermore, as new content and features are added to a platform, it can become overly busy and illogical. Conversely, a platform which changes its design elements and workflow too often will frustrate users. There are benefits in knowing how to efficiently complete a task or where to find specific information. Change should never be simply for change sake.
One of the most straightforward ways to increase the value-add of a Sales Intelligence Service is to expand the content it delivers to its users. Generally, a vendor can license additional content within the same general category (e.g. more contacts) or expand coverage into new content categories not previously supported by the product. The first approach is usually faster and less expensive as there is limited development involved in adding additional coverage within a currently supported category (assuming the vendor is not hitting up against platform limits), but there are still costs involved with licensing, de-duping, and merging content sets. As such, it is much more common for firms to increase the scope of current data sets than to add entirely new content categories to their services.
So which of the fourteen sales intelligence vendors discussed in my new Sales Intelligence book invested in increasing their depth of coverage? Basically, all of them. Of course, the scope of content investment varied greatly:
Avention roughly doubled their global company, contact, and email coverage. Their product now spans sixty million companies, eighty million contacts, and twenty million emails (US and UK). I previously discussed their AsiaPac expansion, but the coverage expansion was global with most of the new content outside of the US, UK, and Canada where they already had significant depth.
DiscoverOrg also greatly increased its coverage as it grew to 60,000 editorially researched company profiles and one million researched contacts. Over the past twelve months, DiscoverOrg had a 91% increase in company coverage, 134% increase in contact coverage, and a 371% increase in non-IT contact coverage (numbers supplied by DiscoverOrg). The non-IT increase was due to an expansion of their job functions datasets to include Product Management (TEDD), Sales, CxO, and HR. The firm also continued to invest in their marketing dataset. CMO Katie Bullard noted that “the Marketing budget has begun to meet or exceed the IT department budget in many companies and vendors” while “service providers selling into marketing continue to proliferate.”
RainKing continues to build out its company and contact coverage and expects to hit one million executives by the end of 2016. The firm roughly doubled the number of decision makers in its database while extending its international coverage. They also have increased the number of marketing, finance, and HR decision makers.
InsideView’s executive coverage grew to 17 million US contacts and 8 million European contacts. Total global contacts more than doubled to 31 million and global emails grew by 10 million to 17 million.
Bureau van Dijk added RepRisk environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk reports to their service while continuing to build out their company database. At the end of the year, Bureau van Dijk provided close to 210 million active and inactive company profiles
DueDil rolled out enhanced financials for UK and Irish registered companies. Along with performance and growth metrics such as EBITDA and multiple CAGRs (compounded annual growth rates), DueDil is providing historical graphs for key metrics. In total, six new metrics and 12 key performance indicators (KPIs) have been added.
Data.com expanded the Dun & Bradstreet content displayed in a new Prospect Insights view. Extended company intelligence includes D&B WorldBase firmographics and linkage, Hoover’s top company descriptions and competitors, and First Research industry overviews with call prep questions and industry summaries.
Infofree grew its executive email file to 26 million.
Salesgenie raised its business email count to 58 million US contacts.
Owler’s primary focus in 2016 was to expand their Competitive Graph and gather additional company intelligence. The Competitive Graph improved as the user base has grown and the firm has implemented a set of data cards (simple user queries such as is company X a competitor of company Y) which help refine sizing data, competitors, and a few other firmographic topics. Revenue and employee figures have grown to 2.7 million companies.
Zoominfo expanded its set of company enrichment variables with the addition of 200 new Company Attributes in October 2016.
LinkedIn continues to add two members per second. At the end of the year, they delivered 467 million global profiles across ten million companies.
Dun & Bradstreet grew its WorldBase file of global companies to 265 million active and inactive firms. Over the past few years, they have also focused on improving the depth and accuracy of their international file.
So who did I omit? Technically Artesian Solutions did not make the content list, but that is simply because their new US edition will be discussed in the new product category. Likewise, InsideView’s Tech Profiler Premium is also being discussed as a new product.
The Sales Intelligence (SI) space has been undergoing some rapid change over the past year. This evolution in functional scope and content sets has resulted in an expansion in the number of companies I cover as well as the categories (ABSD services, PE/VC funding databases). There is also a movement of sales intelligence vendors into marketing intelligence as the traditional SIs look for additional revenue opportunities and a broader value proposition.
A year ago, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was discussed mostly by DemandBase, a top of the funnel programmatic marketing vendor, but the predictive analytics vendors and Zoominfo began discussing the methodology. Thus, a year ago, ABM meant anti-ballistic missile or activity based management to all but the most well-versed marketers. Now the term is commonly found in corporate blogs and collateral and has spawned ABSD (Account Based Software Development) which follows ABM down to the middle of the funnel in the sales development function. There are now several ABSD vendors which I have begun to include in my newsletter including SalesLoft and QuotaFactory. ABSD shifts the sales development focus away from “smile and dial” calling towards targeted messaging into a set of top prospects. Since the prospecting activities are targeting higher value opportunities, there is a benefit to personalizing calls and emails. SalesLoft refers to this activity as “sincerity at scale.”
What is even more impressive about SalesLoft and QuotaFactory is that they are both less than two years old and yet they have already grown in commercial stature to the point where they are building out partner ecosystems with traditional SIs and other vendors. SalesLoft rolled out their Sales Development Cloud at their customer conference last month with nine partners including DiscoverOrg, InsideView, Datanyze, and Owler. At the same time, QuotaFactory announced partnerships with Bedrock Data, Ambition, HG Data, and InsideView.
A second area of rapid growth is the technology sales intelligence vendors. DiscoverOrg and RainKing have grown revenue and capabilities, transforming what was historically a sleepy niche into a significant sub-category. Both vendors have posted high multi-year growth rates, internationalized their datasets, expanded their technology trigger events, and developed CRM and marketing automation connectors. While they continue to gather rich profiles of IT execs, they are broadening their functional coverage to include non-IT functions that are significantly investing in IT cloud solutions such as marketing and finance. DiscoverOrg is continuing this functional expansion with product management (the recently released TEDD dataset), HR, and Sales. Furthermore, their databases, which once focused on the Fortune 1000, now cover nearly 50,000 top global companies and 700,000 executives. Both firms announced significant funding events in the past six months.
Aberdeen Group, which was spun off of Harte-Hanks last year, has begun to invest in the AccessCI database. Once the leading source of technology profiles and leads, the AccessCI (aka CiTDB and CITDS) dataset had received little investment from Harte-Hanks over the prior decade. Under new ownership, the product is once again receiving management attention.
The SIs have also increased their coverage of technographics. Avention acquired SalesQuest two years ago and integrated their Crush profiles into their products while other vendors have licensed vendor/product data from HG Data or mined technographic intelligence. HG Data has become so adept at collecting vendor/product data that DiscoverOrg and Aberdeen Group have begun licensing content from them.
Several firms that began as fundings databases found that Business Development was a logical extension of their value proposition and have since repositioned themselves as sales intelligence solutions. Firms such as DataFox and Mattermark are focusing more on sales intelligence functionality while CB Insights has launched a sales intelligence solution (with technographics) while retaining its focus on the PE/VC space.
For the most part, the SIs have avoided the predictive analytics space. The exceptions are Avention, which supports business signals and ideal profiles, and Radius which morphed from an SMB SI into a predictive analytics company. Meanwhile, the predictive analytics companies are beginning to offer a subset of SI features such as net-new leads.
Instead, the SIs have focused more on marketing analytics, data enrichment, and data hygiene which allows them to leverage their databases without investing in data scientists. Dun & Bradstreet acquired NetProspex last year for its contact database and the Workbench cloud data hygiene platform. They have also begun to offer Hoover’s concierge services including enrichment, segmentation reporting, and email delivery. Avention launched its DataVision customer data platform earlier this year while Zoominfo, Data.com, and InsideView have placed equal weight upon marketing services and sales intelligence services.
Social Selling continues to be a core element of positioning for InsideView and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Artesian Solutions, a UK vendor that is launching a US product later this year, also focuses on social selling. A significant product gap across the SIs is the lack of social tools built into their offering. I can understand why SIs have shied away from Who Knows Who tools (the exceptions are InsideView and DueDil), but it is perplexing why most SI vendors have only limited sets of social media links and little social media content displayed in their services. Only InsideView, Artesian, and Owler have put much emphasis upon social media content.
Europe is also becoming a home of new services. DueDil has evolved into a UK challenger to Avention and BvD Mint while IKO System and Sparklane (formerly Zebaz) have an established presence in France.
When I started my newsletter four years ago, many of the companies and products either had not been launched or weren’t on my radar. I mostly focused on Avention, Hoover’s, InsideView, DiscoverOrg, BvD, Sales Genie, Data.com, and RainKing. While these companies continue to innovate, much of the energy is coming from new entrants. The rapid growth and diversity of sales intelligence functionality has been exciting to observe.
Credit: Darwin’s Finches are in the public domain. Charles Darwin, 1845.
RainKing Org Charts provide headshots, social media links, contact information, and organizational position.
RainKing announced immediate availability of their Global Enterprise technology database spanning 30 countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. The database was built by multi-lingual researchers to the same 95% accuracy standard of their North American and European datasets.
Technology profiles, which include all of the BRICS, span
Asia: China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand
Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama
Other: Russia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey
RainKing contact information includes org charts; emails and direct dial phones; headshots; social media links; and biographies with education, work histories, and job responsibilities. Other editorially reviewed content includes company profiles, technology platform details, and Inside Scoops (500 sales opportunities per day).
RainKing is posting the following dataset counts:
RainKing Company and Contact Counts by Dataset as of March 2016.
RainKing Solutions announced that they received a $67 million equity investment from Boston based Spectrum Equity. RainKing is one of the top sales intelligence solutions for the technology space and provides deep company and contact profiles including org charts, InsideScoops (1,200 daily sales opportunities), and technology profiles spanning 50,000 companies and 500,000 contacts. While the majority of these profiles are for US firms, they have been building out coverage internationally and provide 12,000 European company profiles and a smaller set for AsiaPac, Latin America, and Africa.
The firm differentiates itself through direct research and customer service (they are Ritz Carlton certified and provide round the clock support). Within reason, users can pose research questions to the team or request additional data at no additional charge. As part of the data license, clients are assigned a Client Success Rep who provides consultation and proactively monitors the account, drives usage, and recommends best practices. The Success Rep also assists with data cleansing initiatives and integration with CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms.
Data is collected through direct interviews which gathers contact information (99% fill rate for emails and 93% for direct dial phones), executive responsibilities, org chart position, current projects, and deep platform intelligence. While they focus on the IT function, they also gather decision makers in the Marketing and Finance Departments. Their editorial team consists of 300 editors that update profiles on a sixty day basis.
Bios include email, direct dial, responsibilities, org chart location, education history, and work history. When shown in lists, execs are given an org chart score indicating their relative position in the org chart.
According to the firm, they have over 1,000 clients and 15,000 users.
The company did not indicate where the money will be spent, but they are in a head-to-head competition with DiscoverOrg to internationalize their dataset, extend into marketing services, and expand data collection to additional departments.
Along with the investment, Spectrum Equity placed John Stanfill in the CEO position and placed three members on RainKing’s Board: Principal Mike Farrell, Principal Jeff Haywood, and Managing Director Chris Mitchell.
Stanfill is immediately assuming the CEO position. He most recently served as the SVP of Sales & Customer Support at CoStar Group which grew from $2 million in revenue in 1995 to nearly $600 million in revenue in 2014 when he departed. John managed a global sales and support team of 425.
“RainKing has been on the leading edge of providing outstanding sales intelligence information since 2008 and with the investment and support of Spectrum Equity, we will accelerate the development and delivery of our robust product and data pipeline,” said Stanfill. “We look forward to supporting our clients, which include the tech industry’s largest and fastest growing companies, by providing them with the most accurate, comprehensive and verified information on IT, marketing and finance professionals available in the market today.”
RainKing made last year’s Inc. 5000 list based on a three year growth rate of 150%.
RainKing Solutions landed at 2494 in the 2014 Inc. 5000 list of US private companies with 150% growth over three years.
“We’ve had the opportunity to get to know both John and the rest of the RainKing team over a multiyear period and are thrilled to be partnering with a world class management team as we help to support their continued growth,” said Farrell. “Sales and marketing professionals are overwhelmed with data today. RainKing’s proprietary, highly accurate data accumulated over a nearly 10-year period allows customers to find the best prospects, target the most likely buyer within an organization and know what to say when they reach them. This ability to cut through the noise is incredibly valuable to any vendor selling into the IT market today.”
Aberdeen Group CI Technology Database Infographic (Sept 2015)
Aberdeen Group, which was divested from Harte-Hanks earlier this year, announced a set of enhancements to the CI Technology Data Set (FKA Harte-Hanks Market Intelligence). Upgrades include broader project and platform information, a trebling of contacts, expanded CI Pipeline alerts, and 300 tech focused “technology interest classifiers.” The company claims to cover 90% of the global IT spend across 3 million global locations.
Aberdeen Group uses both human and machine verified processes to identify over $2 billion in technology focused IT Spend. Purchase Plans are tracked at both the company and contact level.
The company added 5,000 new technologies to their tracking bringing the total to 8,878 installed technologies. According to their press release, “combined with the insight surrounding captured IT spend, Aberdeen Group is now uniquely positioned to be the most accurate source of technology install and spend data in the world.”
Aberdeen has grown their contact coverage to ten million names across “every IT buying center important to technology sales, marketing, and business intelligence professionals.” Contacts are combined in Elite Profiles along with IT Platform data and 520 additional variables.
Their CI Pipeline purchase monitoring solution delivers 3,000 net new in-market per month across 35 tech categories.
Aberdeen added a new set of 300 digital interest classifiers allowing users to research companies based upon both their digital and online profiles.
“Companies in the technology industry come to Aberdeen Group when they need a definitive answer about companies and contacts buying technology,” said Aberdeen Group CEO Gary Skidmore. “Our vast and growing technology data assets coupled with our unique data science and technology focused content offer technology executives with insight and assets they can’t find in any other industry source. Our goal is to make it easy for the technology industry to know where to go when they require answers and action surrounding the technology buyer.”
Aberdeen Group did not name their partners, but the intent file sounds like Bombora’s. HG Data lists Aberdeen Group as a partner on their site.
Over the past year, Harte-Hanks has also signed deals with Dun & Bradstreet and Data.com to deliver their file over D&B and Data.com’s Data Exchanges.
Under Harte-Hanks, the CI Technology database fell from market leadership due to limited investment and marketing. DiscoverOrg and RainKing attacked the market with higher quality, top company databases tied into CRM and Marketing Automation platforms while the HHMI solution remained fairly static. Fifteen years ago they would have led any technology intelligence list, but they would now struggle to make many vendor shortlists. These enhancements suggest that the new owners are investing in the database and looking to take DiscoverOrg and RainKing.
The Sales Intelligence (SI) space has been undergoing some rapid change over the past year. This evolution in functional scope and content sets has resulted in an expansion in the number of companies I cover as well as the categories (ABSD services, PE/VC funding databases). There is also a movement of sales intelligence vendors into marketing intelligence as the traditional SIs look for additional revenue opportunities and a broader value proposition.
