Coinciding with its Q3 2022 release, LinkedIn is positioning Sales Navigator as a facilitator of Deep Selling. Deep Sales positions LinkedIn as a new way to sell that addresses many of the current problems faced by sales teams (e.g., The Great Reshuffle, increased deal complexity following COVID, the digitization of communications, and an increase in SPAM). This new positioning was announced in the Wall Street Journal.
“Too many sales professionals are stuck in what we’ve come to call “shallow selling” – an endless, frustrating loop of contacting more and more potential buyers in ways that no longer work,” posted LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ Marketing VP Gail Moody-Byrd. “I’ve felt the pain of sales in my professional life. I’ve consoled colleagues who were at risk of getting fired because they weren’t hitting their numbers or seen them committing “unnatural acts” to get a deal closed. I’ve been on endless, painful pipeline review calls, looking at leads that will never materialize into a closed/won deal. And I feel it daily in my personal life, as I try to dodge intrusive emails, texts, and phone calls that keep coming at me to purchase MarTech software.”
Moody-Byrd argued that shallow selling doesn’t work, but reps can employ deep learning software to support “deep sales.”
“Think of deep learning, where software learns from enormous amounts of reliable data to get to a meaningful answer. Deep sales relies on that kind of data to deeply understand buyers and their context. It helps sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed, at a time in the buying process that makes sense. It helps develop deep relationships with buyers, based on understanding them – the opposite of shallow spray-and-pray tactics.”
LinkedIn claims that Sales Navigator customers enjoy a 38% increase in pipeline generated, a six percent increase in win rates, and a 47% increase in deal size. The firm is positioning the combination of Sales Navigator and Sales Insights as its Deep Sales solution set.
“It’s good to see LinkedIn working on new ways to utilize machine learning to sort its various data inputs and provide a better experience,” stated SocialMediaToday Head of Content Andrew Hutchinson. “Thus far, LinkedIn hasn’t really been able to tap into its unmatched database of professional insights, but maybe, through advanced machine learning on its huge dataset, it’s moving towards the next stage of becoming a critical companion for all HR and business professionals, by facilitating guidance on various fronts that can lead to smarter decisions.”
Sales Navigator actionable insights include relationship intelligence, buyer intent, and Account Insights.
LinkedIn began rolling out the latest edition of its Sales Navigator service to clients at the end of last month. The Q3 release focused on adding intent and engagement data to the sales intelligence service. Intent-based features include a new Account Dashboard with Buyer Intent, a buyer intent filter in Build a List, and intent highlights on the home and account pages.
Other enhancements include a new Lead Panel and an updated search UX that streamlines search execution.
Senior Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, Mitali Pattnaik, blogged that high-performing sellers don’t spend more time selling but:
Focus on the opportunities that matter the most
Identify buyers when they are ready to engage
Go beyond shared connections to find hidden allies
These steps are the “playbook for winning in sales today.” To support sales reps, LinkedIn will focus on “three sets of relevant, actionable intelligence within Sales Navigator: Account insights to understand what matters to your customers and which ones to focus on; Relationship intelligence to map the ideal paths into an account and stay up-to-date on [the] movement of key decision makers; and Buyer intent to see which of your prospects are currently showing interest in your solution.”
Relationship Intelligence includes
Decision makers connected with you or your team
Former coworkers from your current or prior jobs
Prior customers associated with closed/won opportunities in your CRM
Leads following your company on LinkedIn or engaging with your company’s ads
While relationship mapping and account insights have long been part of the Sales Navigator value proposition, buyer intent is a new product focus. Buyer Intent is displayed in a new Account Dashboard that includes a buyer activity timeline with “specific people who have completed intent activities in the past 30 days, as well as a graph showing the distribution across all activities.”
The Account Dashboard identifies both current and new accounts displaying buying intent. Sales professionals can then identify warm paths to high-intent leads.
The Account Dashboard displays buyer interest at saved accounts and prospects.
Account Insights go beyond standard firmographics to include headcount across specific job titles and departments, connectivity across a company’s network, and account growth and engagement trends.
Buyer intent has also been added as a screening variable in Build a List and integrated into the new Lead Panel.
Initially, only four types of buyer intent are supported:
Who’s followed a company
Who’s visited your profile
Who’s a new connection to yourself
Who’s filled out a lead gen form
However, LinkedIn is promising additional buyer intent categories in coming releases.
“This is only the beginning of our multi-year journey to bring intent information to life in our products and services,” wrote VP of Product Management Lindsey Edwards. “We believe understanding intent can make a significant difference in the effectiveness of your go-to-market strategies, and we look forward to embarking on this path together with you.”
LinkedIn contends that its intent data differs from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence. Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account. Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”
Sales Navigator also claimed that it offers a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement,” stated LinkedIn. “Only Sales Navigator will be able to show you intent data throughout the buyers’ journey.”
Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.
“As we improve this dataset, sellers will see a complete view of every intent activity completed, giving a full timeline into the right moment and message and allowing you to reliably capitalize on every warm opportunity.”
“We know B2B selling has gone through a dramatic shift these past few years. We know now that buyers today are far harder to reach, and – quite honestly – many don’t want to be reached. At least not with irrelevant or generic outreach,” wrote Pattnaik. “To help you overcome that, we are focused on this next generation of Sales Navigator. Tapping into the unique power of our Economic Graph, Sales Navigator can help you sell in the way today’s buyers want to buy.”
Buyer intent is available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.
The new Lead Panel streamlines prospecting and quick qualification.
The new Lead Panel accelerates people searching. Instead of opening a new window, a popup panel supports immediate research from lead lists, allowing for quick qualification of prospective leads. In addition, the Lead Panel offers an overview with Save and Message buttons.
The Lead Panel is a beta feature being rolled out to accounts with fifty or fewer seats this quarter. The Lead Panel will eventually be available to all Sales Navigator licensees.
Search enhancements include pinned filters that display as default filters and an expanded industry taxonomy that spans over 400 industries. The new industry codes are aligned with the NAICS North American industry taxonomy.
New search filters include buyer intent and a TeamLink filter (searching across colleague networks).
LinkedIn’s economic graph now spans 850 million business professionals and 58 million companies.
LinkedIn Sales Insights enhancements include a new personas management page, adding persona locations to persona definitions, and increasing the number of persona tags in CRM export to six.
Sales Insights is a data analytics and enrichment service for sales ops.
The Sales Insights Persona Manager
Continue to Part II, which discusses LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ new “Deep Selling” positioning.
Introhive and BoardEx announced a partnership that will “enable shared clients to uncover more high-quality connections and business opportunities that accelerate growth.” The partnership will assist with discovering opportunities, deepening relationships, increasing internal collaboration, and mitigating risk.
“We are excited to offer our clients a joint solution with BoardEx,” said Diana Sapienza, Global Head of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances at Introhive. “With Introhive’s advanced AI-powered relationship mapping, automation, and enrichment capabilities and the BoardEx alerts on role and/or company changes at the executive and board level, our clients can better manage their ever-growing networks to spot opportunities sooner and grow their businesses faster.”
BoardEx, a division of Euromoney People Intelligence, employs a team of over 300 global research analysts focused on mapping relationships between more than 1.5 million business leaders and decision-makers.
“Having a resilient network is critical to the success of any business, and that resiliency relies on the ability to understand and leverage the most impactful professional relationships,” explained Jubayer Kalam, Head of Product for BoardEx. “We are excited to partner with Introhive by embedding BoardEx data and insights directly into their environment for our mutual clients.”
Introhive, which describes itself as a Relationship Acceleration Platform, released a set of enhancements last month that include a new Salesforce Sales Activity Dashboard, Business Intelligence Webhooks, MS Dynamics hygiene tools, and an Outlook Intelligence Panel Search.
Introhive Sales Activity Dashboard for Salesforce
The new Sales Activity Dashboard “cuts through the noise of activity data and delivers the signal directly to sales professionals and leaders alike,” blogged Lead Product Marketer Julie Taylor. “At a glance, Sales Leaders can get a sense for the type and volume of activities their teams are investing their time in, and individual sellers can keep a pulse on their own activity levels to see where they stand.”
The Sales Activity Dashboard is available at both the team and individual rep levels. The report summarizes calls, meetings, and email volumes over the past seven and thirty days.
Global View of Relationships Dashboard is one of Introhive’s new BI webhooks.
New Business Intelligence Webhooks include a Global View of Relationships, Account Relationships Dashboard, and Activities Dashboard.
Introhive’s Cleanse for Microsoft Dynamics added contact record merging and archiving stale records. The service already supported CRM contact data entry and updates. “Understanding your data provides your team with powerful capabilities.
Your success lies in the ability of your people to understand your data and use it to make better decisions,” explained Taylor. “The faster you can make sense of your data by transforming it from information to insights, the further you and your team can go.”
Relationship Intelligence platform Introhive closed on a $100 million Series C. The round was led by PSG, with Bank of America Securities joining. Existing investors The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Aegis Group Partners, Evergreen Coast Capital, and Mavan Capital Partners also participated.
Introhive will be deploying the funds for strategic acquisitions, expanding its global footprint, and growing its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.
“At the moment, our primary goal is to grow as fast as we can possibly grow,” said Global VP of Sales Adam Draper. “And we don’t want pure organic growth to be the limiting factor. So with this amount of money, it just gives us the option (to buy) companies that maybe did well in a certain vertical but couldn’t expand beyond that…or maybe had some sales hiccups, or whatever.”
Introhive, based in Fredericton (New Brunswick) and Miami, anticipates growing from 300 employees to 400 over the next year.
“For us, (the raise) is about continuing to evolve our platform, innovating on technology, staying ahead of our competitive product roadmap, and ensuring the success of our employees,” said Draper.
Introhive Funding History (Source: Owler)
The round follows a strong 2020 during which Introhive claims to have doubled its revenue to over $20 million. It is projecting $100 million by the end of 2023, said Draper.
During the pandemic, Introhive refined its sales processes and workflows.
“We really focused in 2020 on scaling what I call the operational, the core parts,” said Draper. “Anytime you’re scaling, especially in my world, from a sales perspective, it’s easy to put the sales bodies in place, but you have to have the infrastructure to support that. And so we put a lot of time into process workflow, our tech stack, but also our strategy.”
“Our internal compass focuses on the 3 R’s – revenue, retention, and relationships – as the key ingredients to a successful and thriving business,” said Introhive CEO Jody Glidden. “Whether a company is trying to reduce customer or employee churn, make their revenue generating teams more effective or leverage the numerous untapped connections of ‘who knows who’ that exist in their company, Introhive is creating raving fans.”
“Businesses of all sizes are looking for better ways to leverage relationships and drive revenue, and we believe Introhive has built a unique and innovative set of capabilities that allows them to do this more effectively. In our view, Jody and Stewart (Walchli, CRO) have built a world-class product and management team, and the business is well-positioned for its next phase of growth. We couldn’t be happier to join them on their journey.”
Rick Essex, Managing Director at PSG and New Introhive Board Member
Introhive looks to address the high failure rate of CRM projects by mapping relationship data and identifying opportunities. Introhive claims to save its customers $68,400 per employee on lost productivity and automating manual work.
Introhive boosts CRM adoption through automated contact data enrichment and uploads. It claims to uncover 350 additional contacts per user. “The AI engine then maps these contacts to identify relationships across prospects and customer accounts.” By reducing research and data maintenance overhead, sales and business professionals can focus their activities on prospects and clients, driving customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
Last year, Introhive processed more than one trillion transactions, captured 60+ million contacts and relationships, saved nine million employee hours, and supported users across 90 countries.
“Great salespeople are most valuable when they’re building relationships — and business — with customers,” commented Nicole France, Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “By intelligently capturing data insights, technologies like Introhive increase the quality and timeliness of the data and help salespeople prioritize their efforts where it matters most. Sellers can focus more of their time on the insights generated from relationship intelligence and putting it to use. As a result, sales and account teams understand the needs of their customers and prospects better than ever before, resulting in more upsells, shorter lead times, and more revenue.”
Introhive has benefited from using its application. “I think using Introhive at Introhive has always been one of the reasons that we’ve grown so fast,” said Draper. “I remember in the early days, when we couldn’t get leads, we used our software to tap into the networks of our highly connected investors and advisors to create introductions and get some of those first sales.”
Introhive has ten offices in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Middle East, and Asia.
Sales Intelligence vendor Relationship Science (RelSci) unveiled Radar, its latest business development solution. Radar analyzes emails and calendars to deliver insights about interactions between colleagues and target companies. Radar currently supports Microsoft mail platforms (e.g., Exchange, Office 365), with GSuite on the roadmap.
Each morning, business development and sales reps receive an email briefing with the latest intelligence on their scheduled appointments, even if RelSci lacks company and contact profiles for the individuals. Briefings include the date, time, location, meeting attendee lists, and information about the attendees. Daily email briefings can also be accessed from mobile devices.
RelSci intelligence includes the number of colleagues in touch with the individual, total interactions, last interaction date, and latest news. Radar also displays a list of colleagues in touch with execs, sorted by connection strength. For meetings, profiles and network connections are provided for each of the attendees.
“During these unprecedented times, it is more important than ever to help take the guesswork out of targeting prospects by utilizing RelSci with Radar to identify your strongest relationship path, coupled with full insights into your firm’s communication interactions.”
RelSci CEO Domenic Graziosi
Radar provides greater visibility into the relationship capital of a firm, delivering insights about networks across the enterprise. Along with company and contact news, RelSci offers the best path for reaching out to prospects.
“Radar generated insights are derived from Exchange scanning for specified users,” explained RelSci Data Product Manager Brian Hyman. “You need to opt-in for Radar to scan your interactions, meaning that the insights derived from this scanning will only be available for participants. However, RelSci users that do not participate in Radar scanning, but are part of an organization that has Radar participants, will be able to leverage insights generated by those Radar participants.”
Security is controllable at the account level, with each user deciding whether to participate in network sharing.
“You can opt-out of Radar entirely to prevent confidential information from being shared,” wrote Hyman. “You can also set specific sharing rules within every client account to prevent Radar data from certain users from being shared with other specified users. You can also prevent certain content from being scanned by Radar (emails marked as personal, private, confidential, etc.).”
To expedite account setup, admins can assign accounts to Exchange distribution lists maintained by their clients.
RelSci has constructed profiles for over ten million executives and estimated the connection strength between customers and each individual.
Continue to Part II with coverage of pricing, roadmap, and a discussion of Relationship Capital Management.
Sales Intelligence vendors RelPro and Introhive announced a partnership to deliver extended relationship insights and workflow integrations to joint customers in the Professional and Financial Services sectors. The combined solution is immediately available to joint customers.
RelPro integrates content from seventeen data sources to deliver sales insights and contacts across 7 million companies. Introhive adds relationship insights, data automation, and data cleansing tools. The partnership helps “clients achieve greater sales efficiency and productivity” during the pandemic and recession.
“Our clients use RelPro to identify new prospects and ensure the contact information they have for those prospects is accurate and reliable. Being able to map relationships that may already exist within their organization boosts the productivity of their business development professionals and increases referral traffic and collaboration. With Introhive’s advanced relationship intelligence automation technology and data automation capabilities combined with our rich data coverage and quality, our clients can marry two best-in-class solutions to support and enrich their business development activities with little to no disruption of their day-to-day.”
RelPro CEO Martin Wise
Introhive boosts CRM adoption through automated contact data enrichment and uploads. Introhive claims that it uncovers 350 additional contacts per user. “The AI engine then maps these contacts to identify relationships across prospects and customer accounts.” By reducing research and data maintenance overhead, sales and business professionals can focus their activities on prospects and clients, therefore driving customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
“With Introhive, users gain back roughly an average of 12 hours per week that would otherwise be spent on data entry or preparing for meetings. Our Pre-Meeting Digest removes the burden of gathering information to ensure prospect or customer-facing professionals are equipped with everything they need before meetings, while Post-Meeting Reports allow for notes, tasks, and activities to be added to CRM directly from the user’s email inbox. When we add RelPro’s database with our relationship mapping and productivity tools, customers can begin uncovering contacts and opportunities that were previously hidden.”
Introhive CEO Jody Glidden
Several months ago, RelPro released an integration with Vertical IQ to deliver industry intelligence to joint customers. This partnership is bearing fruit as the companies have been providing referrals to each other in the financial services space. Of course, integration partnerships also improve the stickiness of both solutions.
RelPro’s revenue is up a bit during the first half of 2020, and Wise is confident about H2. Their business slowed less due to the pandemic than due to banks focusing on PPP processing for about eight weeks. The banking business has since recovered as they look to provide “on the couch business development” to relationship managers and business development professionals across all segments of the banking industry.
Showing agility, the firm loaded the SBA PPP loan data into their platform and made it screenable. Bankers and advisors can search the 660k companies who received loans in excess of $150,000. The new dataset provides additional banking relationship data that complements UCC (liens) loan data already available through their service.
Introhive has over 240 employees with offices in the US, Canada, the UK, and India. The firm supports over 100,000 global users. Introhive was founded in 2012 with an initial focus on the accounting market. It has taken an industry-by-industry approach and now supports global systems integrators, law firms, finance, commercial real estate, and, most recently, technology firms.
Introhive placed tenth on Deloitte’s Fast 50 with revenue growth of 1,700 percent over four years.
B2B Marketing Data vendor Clearbit partnered with Revenue Operations Platform Clari to deliver enriched contacts into CRMs. Clari identifies external contacts from emails and meeting activity, helping fill out the buying committee. According to Clari, only 30% of sales-engaged contacts are entered into the CRM. By automating the contact identification process, sales reps have a clearer view of the full demand unit, allowing them to target messaging by function and recognize potential gaps in their knowledge of the buying committee.
By expanding knowledge of the demand unit, Clari can identify the broader set of decision-makers and reduce deal risk through multi-threaded relationship building. Relying on one or two contacts has multiple risks:
The sales rep may not be messaging to the full demand unit
Their point of contact may be sidelined or leave the firm
Multiple points of contact may be set up dealing with different vendors, each providing a siloed perspective on the deal.
Post-sale, if users and administrators weren’t involved in the decision, adoption rates might be low, leading to higher churn rates.
The project champion may depart before renewal, forcing the rep to scramble to re-establish relationships at renewal time.
The expanded knowledge also helps marketing teams identify the key personas involved in deals and customize content and messaging.
“Now all the contacts that showed up for a sales meeting, even the ones that were added to the invite by the prospect, are automatically associated with the opportunity without your rep needing to lift a finger.”
Clari Marketing Programs Manager Maggie Kullman
Clearbit enriches the contacts with title, job function, and level. Firmographic and technographic details are also appended.
“As budgets get tighter and operating plans are reworked, having your prospects’ finance team involved early on is critical to accelerating the deal toward close,” wrote Clari Marketing Programs Manager Maggie Kullman. “With the combination of Clari, Clearbit, and a little bit of automation, you can trigger an update to an opportunity field any time a CFO gets added to a meeting with the sales rep. Now you can easily track which of your deals are missing a critical decision-maker and take actions to drive that relationship.”
Demand Units are a term coined by SiriusDecisions a few years ago when they updated their Demand Waterfall model for B2B sales and marketing. Each opportunity is associated with a set of decision-makers (e.g. technical, financial, functional directors) and influencers (e.g. users, admins). Demand Unit discovery is still in the early stages of development, but looking at email headers, out of office messages, and meeting attendees is a promising approach for organically identifying buying committee members.
Relationship strength analytics company Nudge.ai folded this week. Nudge identified the corporate relationship strength with contacts and filtered the open web and social media to provide contact insights. Relationship strength analytics has long been an area of unfulfilled promise going back to early Relationship Capital Management vendors such as VisiblePath. LinkedIn is the only major firm that has successfully built such tools. They provide lead recommendations, referrals, and TeamLink networking with colleagues, but relationship strength is not a focus of their offerings, but more of a side feature in Sales Navigator.
Nudge was
available on the SalesLoft and Outreach partner ecosystems and the AppExchange.
One of 22 employee bios posted in the Nudge.ai Thank You coda.
Nudge did something classy when it folded. It thanked its customers, employees, and investors in its coda. They also turned their website into a thank you page which highlighted the strengths of each employee and provided a link to his or her LinkedIn profile. Because they were a startup, the bios are based upon knowledge of each employee and serve as a reference from management.
“While we can’t say we are “celebrating” failure today, we are thankful that the journey was possible. Although the failure itself is sad, it’s only because it is the end of a journey that was so challenging and rewarding. Every product innovation, customer win, market recognition, or challenge overcome was a step towards a goal we all were working towards. We didn’t reach that goal, but because of everyone around us, we did have a chance to try. And that – that chance to try – is worth celebrating.”
I’ve been sitting on a Harvard Business Review article written by Doug Camplejohn since March due to a surfeit of news. I figured that if I couldn’t slip it into my blog in August, I would never get to it. August is when the press releases slow and there is an opportunity to speak about broader topics such as how to write a press release (or not write one).
Camplejohn’s
advice takes a long-run strategic approach to building and nurturing a social
network based upon ongoing engagement, asking for advice during transitions,
and assisting others. As such, his advice dovetails well with real-world
approaches to building relationship networks.
Camplejohn
begins by recommending that business professionals build their network with
peers instead of focusing on seniority. A peer-based network grows over
one’s career, creating a network which matures with the professional.
Furthermore, senior-executive response rates are lower than mid-level
managers. Less than one percent of VPs and CxOs respond to cold reach
out.
“People earlier in their careers respond most often to an initial message, while VPs and C-level professionals respond the least to people they don’t already know.”
Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn
Initial messages should be short. Camplejohn recommends three sentences that can be easily read on a mobile device. InMail messages of under 100 words work best with response rates “decreasing significantly” beyond 500 words.
Camplejohn
also advises a hook such as an alma mater, joint interest, or a mutual friend.
“According to our research, referencing a mutual connection boosts the
acceptance rate of these messages by 51%, second only to attending the same
school at the same time (53%),” wrote Camplejohn.
Camplejohn
notes the value of asking for advice and leveraging transitions. In
fundraising, there is an adage, “If you go seeking advice, you get money; if
you seek money, you get advice.” Likewise, transition periods are an
excellent opportunity to build your network and seek advice.
“If you’re in a transitional period — starting at a new company, switching industries, or moving to a new city — recognize the opportunity to reach out to people, ask for their advice, and absorb their wisdom.”
Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn
Another
recommendation is to pay it forward. Don’t be looking for immediate
benefits or strictly reciprocal opportunities. Social networkers
recognize that they are contributing to the commons, whether helping one person
or adding to the group. Sales reps and others should also continue to
nurture their network, maintaining conversations with colleagues, clients,
partners, and mentors.
“The best way to build a relationship is to help
someone with joy and with no expectation of anything in return. It feels
good, it trains your own sense of generosity, and it informs you of what the
other person values. It also sets the stage for you to ask them something
in the future. You don’t have to offer to help in every circumstance, but
make yourself available as a resource to people, particularly to people who are
just starting out in their careers.”
Camplejohn concludes that online networking should be viewed as an extension of real-world interactions: “Connect with people personally by finding common ground, then build trust and long-term relationships, rather than one-time transactions.”
ABM vendor DemandBase announced a new dataset it calls the DemandGraph which combines its WhoToo dataset of crawled business information with Spiderbook relationship data. The expanded content set employs semantic mining and machine learning to assemble the “entire business network of a company” which helps “identify which companies and buying committees are in-market for particular solutions.” The DemandGraph helps users target in-market accounts, identify key buyers, uncover meaningful insights, and deliver personalized content. While they have not announced specific predictive tools or capabilities, they are hinting at such tools.
This expanded information set of customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, and investments is built from:
Unstructured business knowledge such as SEC filings and annual reports
Demandbase’s proprietary identification technology that maps billions of network IP addresses to businesses worldwide
Complex corporate hierarchies extending beyond subsidiaries and remote offices to include vendor, customer and partner relationships
The digital footprint of web activity by businesses including ad impressions and web traffic from more than 3 billion B2B interactions every month
“DemandGraph isn’t exactly a product but rather a resource that Demandbase will use to power other products,” said analyst David Raab of Raab Associates. “It lets Demandbase more easily build detailed profiles of people and companies, including history, interests, and relationships. It can then use the information to predict future purchases and guide marketing and sales messages. There’s also a liberal sprinkling of artificial intelligence throughout DemandGraph, used mostly in Spiderbook’s processing of unstructured Web data but also in some of the predictive functions. If I’m sounding vague here it’s because, frankly, so was Demandbase. But it’s still clear that DemandGraph represents a major improvement in the power and scope of data available to business marketers.”
The DemandGraph captures what I’ve long called the “company ecosystem” that goes beyond lists of competitors to include partners, advisors, investors, customers, etc. An understanding of corporate relationships creates an opportunity to extend beyond traditional six degrees solutions when looking for introductions and relationships. A few companies have attempted to gather this data, but none have figured out how to market this broader relationship intelligence outside of industry niches such as technology (e.g. DiscoverOrg, RainKing, HG Data), advertising (e.g. TheList/WinMo), and PE/VC datasets (e.g. CB Insights, Mattermark, DataFox, Crunchbase).
Likewise, when LinkedIn describes their Economic Graph, they are focused on people and their relationships to other people and organizations, not the relationships between organizations.
Demandbase claims that company relationships captured within their business graphs offer twenty times the predictive power of social network relationships. Demandbase SVP of Technology Aman Naimat asserted that “DemandGraph has proven that it can be 7-8 times more accurate than an account executive trying to predict a potential customer, which provides better targeting and conversion.”
Chief Product Officer Alan Fletcher dubbed DemandGraph a “personal concierge” which supports personalization across all sales and marketing touchpoints. “That consistency in messaging throughout the whole sales funnel is what we’re trying to do, and you can only do that if you have the underlying data. It’s what the best account managers already do today, but it obviously doesn’t scale. Large companies can only do it for their top 200 targets.”
Fletcher suggested that this relationship ecosystem is also predictive of investments, acquisitions, and potential partnerships but that the company is “focused on predicting the next customer.” The DemandGraph provides insights into the culture of an organization. “Do they do businesses with startups? Do they only like to do business with established companies? Do they typically sell t0 people that are only involved with McKinsey?” asked Fletcher. “There are a bunch of signals that may not be directly related to you and your products.”
