Tag: Sales Intelligence

TechTarget Priority Engine Enhancements

Priority Engine’s new Account Journey report.

TechTarget released the latest update to Priority Engine, with expanded sales intelligence insights, workflows, and data syncing.  Enhancements support greater Salesforce functionality and additional Prospect-Level Intent use cases.  Prospect-level intent is generated from GDPR-compliant activity across its network of 150 enterprise technology media sites and over 1,000 topical video channels.

“To serve the more than 30 million opted-in members (your buyers) across our information networks and keep them coming back, we have to stay on top of their rapidly evolving information needs,” blogged CMO John Steinert.  “We need to anticipate where categories and organizations are going and be there for our members.  And that means, for our tech vendor clients, we can be the best possible source of insights into what’s happening in their hyper-specific categories, for both strategic and tactical – lead gen or otherwise — purposes.  We help them turn our audiences (represent their markets) into more demand, better leads, and healthier opportunity pipelines.”

Furthermore, Prospect-Level Intent improves both sales and marketing performance.  For example, email nurture campaigns that target active buyers and prospect interests “commonly result in dramatically higher CTRs vs. cold contact outreach.”

Likewise, outbound sales activity targeting active prospects with demonstrated intent enjoy “significantly higher” call conversion rate.

A TechTarget analysis of over 350,000 opportunities across 90,000 accounts found that TechTarget-influenced deals progressed to closed/won status 35% faster than other opportunities.

“When B2B tech buyers need to solve business problems, they come to TechTarget first because we provide both the independent decision-support editorial content they respect and the vendor content they seek in a context that caters to their buying ‘jobs-to-be-done.’ Priority Engine provides our clients with deep insight into these buying team and buyer’s journey interactions so they can better capitalize on real demand taking shape in their markets.  This release gets this proprietary data directly into more GTM users’ hands and makes it easier for them to drive critical impact for their organizations.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

TechTarget improved its Salesforce syncing and real-time territory management.  Syncing supports both standard Account and Opportunity objects and custom fields associated with these objects.

For example, customers may now build and dynamically update Priority Engine Account Lists using customer first-party account attributes such as target account lists, accounts in specific geos, or by opportunity status.

Priority Engine also supports syncing of third-party data sources stored in Account custom fields such as 6sense stages, Demandbase minutes, or Bombora scores to build Account Lists.

TechTarget VP of Corporate Communications Garrett Mann provided additional detail on the benefits of improved syncing to GZ Consulting: “The ability to dynamically sync and automatically update Priority Engine Account Lists based on customer first-party data and third-party data enables several benefits across sales, marketing, and ABM use cases, for example: (1) The ability to set and continuously update sales rep territories based on Account Owner, ensuring sales reps using Priority Engine are always seeing insights and new prospects from current account targets; (2) the ability to integrate separately purchased 6sense, Demandbase, and/or Bombora data with Priority Engine Account Intent for a single source of truth; (3) the ability to export into MAP nurture opted-in TechTarget prospects from Accounts where both TechTarget and 3rd party intent providers are seeing down-funnel demand; (4) and the ability to target TechTarget lead generation or advertising campaigns using this data.”

Other Priority Engine enhancements include:

  • An improved user experience and navigation that expedites account monitoring.  Intent insights include new buying team members engaging, named prospects and customers researching competitors, or accounts accessing late-stage decision-making content.
  • A new account journey visualization that displays valuable demand-related activities at accounts across both client systems and the TechTarget network.
  • Streamlined user management and administration for target account lists and territory management.  Admins will also benefit from simplified seat license administration and usage dashboards.
  • A new Opportunity Dashboard in Salesforce that displays the progression of opportunities, where go-to-market teams should take action, and where TechTarget has influenced deals.
The new Opportunity Dashboard may be viewed by deal counts or dollar volume.
The Opportunity Dashboard Top Influenced Accounts.

“No matter your stack, realizing the value of RevOps sinks or swims based on the accuracy and quality of the intent and contact data – and TechTarget has that in droves,” said Sales Community Founder Randy Seidl, “The backbone of any successful GTM revenue motion isn’t how many tools you have, it’s about the insights and data that you’re using in them that unlocks value.”

Data Axle Expanded Universe

This is part II of my discussion of Data Axle. On Monday I covered the launch of its Audience360 cloud-based data management platform.

B2B data vendor Data Axle announced expanded US content coverage, including additional depth for federal contractors, startups, nonprofits, and medical professionals.  Organizational counts grew five percent, with Data Axle “adding hundreds of thousands of sought-after businesses and millions of new or updated contacts,” with “new attributes [that] are incredibly accurate and reliable,” explained Senior PR Manager Courtney Black to GZ Consulting.  “Businesses can use this data to effectively identify prospects, which is particularly important in the current economic climate.”

New coverage includes 20 thousand more startups, 100 thousand federal contracting businesses, 100 thousand medical professionals, 35 thousand restaurants and bars, 500 thousand nonprofit organizations, and two million other US-based companies.

The medical professionals dataset spans 44 medical occupation titles and 124 specialties.

The federal contracting coverage has long offered ownership flags for veteran, minority, and women-owned businesses.  Data Axle added Unique Entity Identifiers (UEI) alongside the expanded coverage.

Startup profiles include names, address fields, phone numbers, industry codes, corporate email addresses, websites, Twitter, and other social media handles.  The firm recently added a source of technology startups but did not disclose the name.

Nonprofit profiles include EINs (federal tax ids).  As most nonprofits do not earn revenue, the data set focuses on modeled machine-learning employee counts.  Board members are included in the coverage.

Data Axle publishes data on 16.8 million US and 1.1 million Canadian businesses.

Data Axle content spans nearly 18 million US and Canadian verified businesses and 150 million business contacts.  Data Axle also added or updated 10.3 million contact records, with “superior coverages of firmographics, such as industry type, professional specialty, cuisine, and geocoding.”

“All our products benefit from the extended datasets,” explained Data Axle Marketing SVP Kara Alvarez to GZ Consulting.  “Business data is added to Data Axle’s platform in real time as we identify updates, and each of our products and services leverages this central fulfillment platform as do many clients.”

Among the benefits listed by Alvarez were:

  • B2C Link connections offer more contact-to-consumer connections, tying together business and consumer profiles.
  • Data Axle products, including Genie (formerly Sales Genie), USA, Exact Data, and Reference, etc., enjoy expanded business data.  For example, Genie contains “attributes specific to the use cases Genie clients focus on as opposed to the more extensive set available in our data platform.”
  • Data Axle’s standard and custom programmatic audiences “are always current” in any channel.   Partner ecosystem audiences “also benefit as they ingest those updates.”

“At Data Axle, we are constantly seeking to expand the number of records available to our clients while simultaneously ensuring that the quality of our premium verified data remains at the highest level possible,” said Data Axle CEO Michael Iaccarino.  “Our clients count on us for data at scale but also accuracy.  We focus on carefully integrating machine learning into our processes.  However, we will never cease leveraging human verification.  We make over 20 million calls yearly to ensure details and key information are correct.”

Data Axle also gathers consumer data, so its B2C Link dataset benefits from the increased breadth of businesses and medical professionals.

“As a leading provider of consumer data in addition to business datasets, Data Axle plays a vital role in establishing a crucial connection between businesses and consumer profiles,” stated the firm.  “The recent addition of business contacts in Q2 further strengthens this connection.  Data is available separately for organizations looking to build insights between the two datasets or as a prebuilt set of audiences.”

Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence

Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence brings together first and third-party intelligence.

ABX Platform Demandbase announced a Smarter Sales Intelligence solution that combines Demandbase Sales Intelligence with additional tools, data, and prescriptive insights.  UX enhancements include prescriptive dashboards with personalized account and contact recommendations.

The firm had a little fun with its press release, publishing a semi-tongue twister headline, “Demandbase Saves Stressed Sellers by Simplifying Sales with Smarter Sales Intelligence.”  But wait!  There’s More!  Demandbase also released a 90-second infomercial touting their Sales Intelligence solution that “consolidates sales intelligence tools in both first and third-party data, and all in one place.  It’s like having a superpower for smarter selling!  Get easy access to insights, best-in-class predictive models, and contact recommendations integrated within your existing tools.”

Many of the UX changes were based on customer feedback, with the critical account information at the top.  Content includes the journey stage, top intent keywords, people, predictive scores, and firmographics.

“The idea is that we’re bringing all the information that sellers care about and then presenting it on one screen so that they don’t have to go places to find it,” explained Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier to GZ Consulting.  “It’s a unification of the data.”

Sellers “don’t enjoy the research aspect” of account-based selling, continued Breier.  “They just want to be doing outreach.”  Therefore, Demandbase is “meeting the sales reps “wherever there’s spending time, whether that is their browser, CRM, or SEP.”

The Prescriptive Sales Dashboard provides a “unified and prioritized view of a seller’s territory/account list.”

Prescriptive Sales Dashboards proactively inform sellers where they should direct their attention, when they should reach out, and what they should say.  Both accounts and contacts are recommended, with suggestions specific to each rep’s territory.  The Dashboard calls out the top accounts and contacts for outreach based on activity and intent; that is, which leads have the highest probability of converting into opportunities.

The Sales Dashboard offers multiple filters, identifying accounts that:

  • “I should reach out this week.”
  • “have been in the news recently.”
  • “are most engaged.”
  • “have the highest intent.”
  • “have a high likelihood to become an opportunity.”

And contacts that

  • “I should reach out this week.”
  • “Are not in my CRM.”
  • “Are part of the buying group and from Top Accounts.”
  • “Are former buyers.”
  • “Are trending on my website.”

High engagement lists are likely to be compelling for reps.  In many cases, they will be aware of the engagement as they are directly involved.  Still, there will also be situations where they are unaware of the engagement (e.g., Customer Success set up a trial at the account or individuals attended a webinar or responded to a marketing campaign) and missing an opportunity for outreach.

Recommendations are not black-boxed but include engagement data and known contacts in the buying group.  If a rep disagrees with a recommendation, a feedback button helps train the model.

“One of the biggest risks when you’re trying to get adoption from the sales persona on something like this, is losing their trust,” explained Breier.  “We want to give some context and qualify the recommendation that we’re making.”

Demandbase also identifies and recommends contacts for outreach, even if they aren’t currently in the CRM.  Along with names and titles, Demandbase feeds emails, mobile phones, technographics, intent signals, and persona-based messaging.  New fields include Demandbase’s predictive scores:

  • Pipeline Predict Score: How likely an account will become a pipeline opportunity.
  • Qualification Score: Likelihood an account will ever become a customer, regardless of where it is in the buyer journey.

Demandbase continues to build out its data coverage, with 83 million companies, 147 million contacts, 87 million emails, and 40 million direct dials. Much of its third-party content was integrated after they acquired InsideView and DemandMatrix two years ago.

Account Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).
People Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).

Furthermore, Demandbase simplified its user interface to display the most important information about prospects and customers.

Yesterday, I wrote about Demandbase’s new Outreach connector which integrates Demandbase’s Sales Intelligence product within the Outreach Sales Engagement Platform.

Demandbase / Outreach Integration

Demandbase announced a native Outreach integration with other SEPs in development.  Streamlining Sales Intelligence and Sales Engagement allows reps to “focus on engaging with prospects and closing deals, rather than wasting time on manual tasks.”  The I-frame integration supports core Demandbase Sales Intelligence functionality within Outreach workflows.  For example, sales reps can research companies and contacts, build lists, and launch Outreach sequences inside of Outreach.

The Demandbase Sales Intelligence Watchlist displayed as an I-frame tab in Outreach.

Users will see common information, tools, and workflows presented in the same format as their CRM but in Outreach’s Account, Prospect, and Opportunity records.  There is also a standalone tab in Outreach similar to the Demandbase standalone tab found in CRMs.  This Custom Tab supports company and contact searching, prospect list building, connection management for warm introductions, customer and prospect news tracking, and custom buying trigger configuration.

“We’ve noticed that the order of preference as far as where sellers spend time actually starts with their SEP – So, Outreach.  And if they have to, they’ll go to CRM,” observed Demandbase Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier.  “When you look at Outreach users who have Demandbase and Outreach, they can spend all of their time within Outreach and never have to go to the Demandbase platform.  They’re not missing out on any information… It’s just one less thing that they have to learn and one less barrier to access the Demandbase information.”

“Being a seller has never been easy, but the proliferation of data and tools has led to stressed-out sellers with lost productivity, lower quota attainment, and less revenue,” says Gabe Rogol, chief executive officer at Demandbase. “With our simplified and smarter Sales Intelligence solution, reps no longer need to waste precious time figuring out their next steps and executing them.  Instead, they can close more deals and make more money.  Think of our intelligence as a sales superpower, all within the tools sellers use every day.”

Demandbase Sales Intelligence is integrated with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach, Slack, and browsers.  The Sales Engagement integration enables reps to add contacts to Outreach sequences and personalize the messaging.

“Integrating Demandbase’s Sales Intelligence directly within our platform will unlock new levels of value for sales teams looking to efficiently create and predictably close more pipeline,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina.  “With this next-generation integration, sellers can more easily and quickly find and contact accounts, get data-focused insights, and unlock new levels of productivity — all while never leaving the Outreach Sales Execution Platform.”

Demandbase recently dropped the Cloud Designations for its products, emphasizing its unified functionality within the Demandbase One platform.

“We found that it kind of creates this illusion of complexity that we don’t feel serves it justice as far as the actual products you’re spending time in,” said Palmer.  “They’re even more interconnected.  Most of our customers are now buying three or more products.  We’ve got bundles and packages of everything, so we’ve just moved away from that whole cloud nomenclature to just Demandbase One.”

The Cloud services will now be called Demandbase ABX, Demandbase Advertising, Demandbase Sales Intelligence (FKA InsideView), and Demandbase Data.

A Hot Leads feature that provides SDRs with key engagement insights and the ability to take action on unknown leads will soon be available.  Hot Leads will be displayed in the Prescriptive dashboards and identified by engagement activity, intent, recency, news/company/job changes, technographics, etc.  Hot Leads will be GDPR and PII compliant.

In other news, Demandbase was named a Notable Provider in Forrester’s Account-Based Selling Technologies Landscape, Q2, 2023 report.  Seventeen vendors were included in the report.  Account-Based Sales vendors “improve visibility into the potential of each account; increase sales rep efficiency; and increase pipeline value (deal size), win rates, and forecast accuracy.”

“The landscape for B2B GTM teams continues to change at [a] breakneck pace.  At Demandbase, we’re committed to shaping that market evolution to empower our customers to achieve their most audacious goals,” said Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw.  “This year, we’ve placed a deep focus on making sellers’ jobs easier and more effective with AI-powered insights and seamless workflows, and we believe our inclusion in this report further validates that direction.”

Continue to my coverage of Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q2 2023 Release

LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago.  As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers.  New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.

LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality.  However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”

LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.

Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities.  Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).

The new Sales Navigator Account Hub.

The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities.  It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.

“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis.  “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data.  Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”

The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:

  • Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
  • Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence.  Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
  • Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub.  Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
  • Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them.  Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent

Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1.  Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category.  The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.

Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor.  Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole.  The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.

On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.

“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.

At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts.  Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.

“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare.  “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals.  Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies.  With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities

New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages.  These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).

Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:

  • Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
  • New connections to colleagues
  • LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
  • LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
  • Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website

“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment.  If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance.  If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix.  “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”

Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”

Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.

Other Search enhancements include:

  • A simplified saved search UX
  • A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
  • A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
  • Current job title and past job title filters

The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions.  Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.

LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year.  The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment.  At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.

SalesIntel Unlimited Credits

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

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

SalesIntel’s unlimited content includes:

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

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

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

SalesIntel has simplified pricing based on the number of seats.

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

Removing credit-based pricing offers several benefits to customers: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owler Adds Contact Data to Its Max Service

Crowd-based Company Research vendor Owler added contacts to its Owler Max Sales Intelligence service.  Owler was launched in 2011 by Jim Fowler after he sold contacts database Jigsaw (renamed Data.com but now decommissioned) to Salesforce.  Both databases employed a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to collecting data, but Owler offered only the CEO name and executive change news alerts. Broader contact details for its 15 million company profiles were not available until now.

Owler grew into a respected database for competitive tracking, funding data, and news alerts but avoided contact data.  As it increasingly positioned itself as a sales tool, it needed to address its lack of contacts.

Contact Data, which is only being added to its top-end Max edition, includes direct phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles for 150 million North American professionals.  Along with firmographics, users can filter contacts by Job Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Location.

Contact data is available via Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chrome.

‘We are very excited to introduce Contact Data into our Owler Max tool.  This is a powerful way to get in touch with potential customers and partners,” stated CEO Tim Harsch.  “Our goal has always been to make it easier for companies to grow and succeed, and this new addition to our platform will help our users do just that.”

Contacts may be filtered by Name, Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Current Location.

TechTarget Confirmed Projects Added to Priority Engine

IT Sales & Marketing Intelligence vendor TechTarget enhanced its intent capabilities with Confirmed Projects, a set of verified projects obtained via direct interviews with a buying team member.  Confirmed Projects are planned for the next twelve months and include purchase requirements, challenges, desired outcomes, location, timeframe, and the vendor short-list.

Confirmed Projects are available through TechTarget’s Priority Engine Sales Intelligence service.  Project contact data are triple verified (email, phone, and employment) along with the contacts’ role in the purchase process.

“Confirmed Projects include specific insights on the technical and business purchase considerations in-market accounts are looking to address — intelligence that will dramatically increase seller efficiency and productivity because they now know where and how to concentrate their efforts to get in on real deals,” stated the firm.

Priority Engine’s enhanced territory filtering helps sales reps home in on their best opportunities.

“Thousands of B2B sellers use Priority Engine every day to fuel their outbound efforts by discovering new active buyers in their territories plus prospect-level intent that helps them break through,” said CPO Andrew Briney.  “The integration of Confirmed Projects into Priority Engine gives them a unique ability to attack and revive stalled mid-funnel opportunities with precise, actionable details on verified purchase plans.”

The value proposition of Priority Engine with Confirmed Projects

Lavender Series A

Lavender Insights

Lavender, which markets an AI-powered sales email coaching platform, closed an $11 million Series A, raising its total funding to $13.2 million.  Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Signia Venture Partners.  The funding follows strong growth in 2022, with revenue rising 865%.

Funds will be deployed towards expanding its team and introducing “new AI-powered features that help revenue teams not just understand why their messaging is falling flat but also provide actionable coaching to improve productivity and generate faster responses.”

“Lavender’s new investment helps it build out a generative AI solution at the intersection of email marketing, sales enablement, and news and information,” wrote Outsell Lead Analyst Randy Giusto.  “It shows where sales and marketing intelligence vendors must head next.”

Lavender integrates with a user’s email workflow, helping reps improve response rates.  It also delivers prospect company and contact intelligence.  Lavender scores emails and recommends steps to improve response rates.  It also “coaches sales reps on how to build meaningful relationships and close more deals.” 

Along with raising response rates, email composition time is significantly reduced.  Lavender claims that rep time writing an email drops from fifteen minutes to one while raising email response rates fourfold to twenty percent or more.

“Using Lavender is like giving every seller on the team a dedicated coach, making them more effective, more efficient, and more confident in their job,” stated CEO William Ballance.  “This funding quickly accelerates our ability to build the best email experience for sellers around the world.  Most importantly, we’re creating new jobs as our team of #EmailWizards rapidly expands.”

The Lavender Team Dashboard

Lavender recommendations are initially based on “millions of successful sales emails and your historical emails.”  However, it continues to adjust recommendations based on “what works best for you.”

Lavender evaluates the subject and body to improve open rates.  It will identify subjects that are too long, not in title case, or contain numbers and punctuation.  For the body, it looks at the length, layout, spelling, and grammar.  For example, long sentences and paragraphs are difficult to read on mobile devices, so they are discouraged.  According to Lavender, 80% of buyers are viewing emails on their phone, “so making emails easily scannable on a mobile device is imperative.”  A mobile preview window displays the email as it would appear on phones.

“We recommend things across multiple categories, including formatting, phrasing, tonality and emotional intelligence, mobile optimization, personalization, and more,” explained Lavender COO Will Allred to GZ Consulting.  “The data is always shifting though, and as trends shift in sales emails/what works well for that user and/or their team, Lavender’s scoring and recommendations dynamically adjust accordingly.”

Other Lavender features include a coaching dashboard, AI for Sales emails, and a personalization assistant.  The coaching dashboard provides individual and team email scores, open rates, reply rates, and writing time.  It helps managers determine which reps require additional coaching, what is working, and why it is working.

Lavender includes a “Start my Email” function that employs generative AI to “draft impactful outgoing email messages” based on seed bullet points from the rep or as email responses based on the email thread. 

The generative AI is OEM’d from OpenAI & Cohere.

The personalization assistant displays recipient context to assist with personalization.  For example, lavender surfaces social data, personality insights, news, events, job listings, funding announcements, and other intelligence within the composition workflow.  Lavender AI also recommends “personalized intros to tailor your email and make it relevant to the recipient.”

Lavender is integrated with Gmail, Outlook, Outreach, and Salesloft.  Lavender Anywhere, a Chrome extension, supports email composition for HubSpot, LinkedIn, Groove, Apollo, Engage, Outplay, and Mailchimp.  As Lavender Anywhere is not directly integrated with these platforms, users must cut and paste the resulting text into the communication window.  Lavender Anywhere is available with Pro and Teams licenses.

“Lavender is delivering exceptional value to our customers.  Their integration provides real-time email assistance to help Salesloft customers build and deepen their relationships with prospects through better emails,” said Salesloft VP of Global Alliances Devin Schiffman.  “We share in the mission of helping sellers be loved by the buyers they serve.”

Customers include Twilio, Sharebite, Sendoso, Segment, Lucidworks, and Clari.  Allred said Lavender sells into a “large range” of companies, “but our sweet spot tends to be mid-market tech or tech-enabled companies.”

“Lavender is marketed toward ‘sales emails’ – but many things are a sale,” continued Allred.  “Our users use Lavender for B2B sales, recruiting, customer success, marketing, and many more.”

While output is English only, features such as the email generator or summary tools can ingest foreign language input.  Thus, Lavender “works great for ESL (English second language) selling into English speaking markets,” said Allred.

“Lavender’s platform goes beyond basic AI-generated writing to augment—rather than automate—sales outreach and humanize every interaction.  It supercharges sales reps by reducing their time spent writing emails so that they can focus on building relationships and selling products,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners.  “We were blown away by the ‘customer love’ for Lavender’s product, which is a testament to the founding team’s deep understanding of their end user and the tight-knit community of sales leaders it has already built.  We’re excited to partner with this team on the journey ahead.”

The firm has benefited from the recent interest in generative AI and ChatGPT.  “We were using GPT-3 long before ChatGPT was a thing, but ChatGPT has definitely increased interest in Generative AI more broadly.  Users have created UGC (user-generated content) of them using Lavender to edit ChatGPT–generated emails,” explained Allred.  “But before ChatGPT was released, thousands of users were already getting the benefit of it within Lavender.”

“We view the process of emailing as four parts: research, creation, editing, and learning,” continued Allred.  Lavender assists in all four.  Generative models can assist along the way to streamline things for our users.”

Lavender employs a freemium pricing model.

Lavender is sold on a freemium basis.  Free users receive email analysis and personalization for five emails per month. 

Reps can license an Individual Pro license for $29 per month that provides unlimited emails and recommendations.  In addition, the Pro service includes Lavender Anywhere, multi-inbox support, analytics, and Gmail and Outlook 365 integrations.

For $49 per user per month, companies can license a Team edition that includes Team AI coaching, Team Insights, a Manager’s Dashboard, and SEP integrations for Salesloft or Outreach. Lavender offers a seven-day free trial and free premium licenses for job seekers, students, and bootstrapped entrepreneurs.

Vainu’s Nordic Coverage

Vainu’s Nordic Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

Vainu’s updated Build a List UX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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