Tag: Sales Triggers

Artesian Solutions Plants its Flag in Boston

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UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions recently incorporated in the United States and opened a Boston office.  The firm has also signed several data partnerships which allow them to expand coverage to 25 million companies and 65 million people.  The firm did not indicate the names of their partners or geographic distribution of the coverage.

The firm has already signed five US customers from the banking, finance, and technology sectors.  To manage US operations, founder Mike Blackadder has relocated to Boston.  The firm has also hired Tom Beriau as their new Vice President of Sales based out of Boston. Tom has over twenty years of enterprise software sales experience.

Artesian Solutions provides mined news and sales triggers from the open web along with a social media view (Twitter and Blogs). Their core offering is the Artesian Social Intelligence SaaS platform which supports company and prospect research on the web, within CRMs (SFDC and MS Dynamics), and via the mobile browser (iPad).

Artesian supports 25,000 users in the UK.  Clients include Adobe, American Express, Barclays, Cisco, Citi, Deloitte, HSBC, KPMG, and Siemens.

“Incorporation sends a clear message to our US customers about our intention to provide support for our award winning service on a global basis,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “Our largely multi-national customers many of whom are headquartered in the US, have been driving demand for Artesian – regarded by them as more than just smart data and insights about customers but a complete sales engagement solution which complements LinkedIn. Think of Artesian providing engagement smarts for companies and markets is the same way LinkedIn does for people insights. Our new office in Boston is just the beginning of our expansion strategy, but it will ensure we are perfectly placed to capitalise on this glaring gap in the market, and provide our customers with the solutions they are demanding, everywhere they operate.”

Boston was selected as it offers “a great base from which to service customers across the whole of the US, as well as a stepping stone towards delivering a truly global offering.”

Boston is also the home of several other sales and marketing intelligence companies including Avention, D&B NetProspex, and Zoominfo.

The firm claimed that it is growing at 100% per annum.  Unfortunately, they did not provide the growth metric (i.e. revenue, customers, users).

Artesian posted an impressive 94% retention rate last year.

Last June, Artesian closed an $8 million Round B. The round was led by previous investors Octopus Investments and Kreos Capital raising total funding to $11.2 million. The funds were dedicated to UK infrastructure growth, international expansion, and ongoing investment in mobile and social apps.

In December, the firm released a calendar-linked mobile app called Ready which helps sales professionals prepare for meetings by providing the latest news, insights, and financials to sales reps. The new service “demonstrates Artesian’s commitment to product innovation and developing cutting-edge mobile applications that help strengthen its customers’ brands and accelerate their sales success.”

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The Artesian Ready mobile app provides integrated calendaring, meeting notes sharing, and alerting via Apple iOS and Android devices.

The app, available at no charge to Artesian customers on the Apple and Google stores, also supports team collaboration and information sharing. According to Artesian, “Ready allows users attending the same meeting to collaborate and share insight on the go, ensuring that they never miss a thing. Ready delivers tangible commercial outcomes – the pre-sales meeting ritual will never be the same again!”

In the 2016 edition of my Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors, I am planning on expanding coverage to UK products.  This will include profiles of DueDil, Bureau van Dijk (BvD), and Artesian Solutions.  Avention, which has strong offerings for US, UK, and global sales teams, is covered in my 2015 edition.

Detecting Latent Sales Opportunities via Sales Triggers

Avention Sales Trigger Sample
I have been a contributing writer to FreePint, a UK based information services journal, for several years now.  Unfortunately, most of my work rests behind a subscription firewall, making it difficult to share content to non-subscribers.

Last week, my most recent piece, “Detecting Latent Sales Opportunities via Sales Triggers” published.  The article discusses how sales reps use sales triggers to identify emerging demand for B2B products and services.  While traditional reps followed the money to customers and prospects with long-standing demand patterns, trigger-driven reps focus on “agile organisations in a state of flux”.  Unfortunately, many of the firms with established demand are subject to institutional inertia due to established purchasing patterns and relationships.

But firms that are in a state of flux are less beholden to historic decisions and relationships and more willing to accept the risk of adopting new products, services, and processes.  Flux is often tied to trigger events such as M&A activity, PE/VC funding, and executive changes.  For example, a new CMO is not beholden to historic decisions, but can freely evaluate Martech and AdTech vendors.

When evaluating sales trigger vendors, precision is a key quality variable.  You want to purchase a service that has high precision for both company and subject tagging.  The service should also have strong de-duping so that sales reps do not receive more than a few hits on any event (and no direct duplicates of articles and press releases republished on different sites or with trivial modifications).

Sales Trigger Precision (STP) should be viewed as

STP = Company Accuracy * Topic Accuracy * (1 – Duplicate Frequency)

Thus, if company or topic accuracy fall below 90% or the duplicate frequency exceeds 10%, the overall STP falls quickly.  Unfortunately, if precision is low, then sales reps will quickly begin ignoring their trigger feeds or turn them off.  Then a valuable resource goes to waste.

While determining the overall accuracy of a sales intelligence service is difficult, setting up a few triggers and measuring the STP is fairly straightforward.  Just make sure you use the same companies and topics when comparing vendors.  Even better, if you can run your benchmark over the same period then you will have an even stronger test.