Tag: Technology Sales Intelligence

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q4 Release

LinkedIn Sales Navigator unveiled its Q4 release this month with new account and relationship intelligence lists, improvements to buyer intent, refined searching, expanded revenue and technology data, and a more streamlined ability to upload a sales rep’s book of business.

The new My Current Accounts homepage prompt lets sales reps load their book of business as a CSV list matched against LinkedIn company profiles.  In addition, LinkedIn offers a quick field mapper to ensure the CSV is properly ingested and matched to the correct LinkedIn company profiles.

Account Lists provide several benefits to sales reps.  Sales Navigator users can

  • Target in-market accounts based on LinkedIn Buyer Intent
  • Review real-time alerts around sales triggers such as funding events, leadership changes, and headcount growth/decline
  • Streamline search and prospecting efforts by spotlighting specific saved searches based a user’s book of business

“Yes, it’s great on its own,” blogged LinkedIn Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray.  “But it reaches a whole new level of capability when you can manage your entire book of business in Sales Navigator – insights surfaced via features like Buyer Intent are more actionable, searching becomes more powerful, and it’s that much easier to stay on top of what’s happening at your most important accounts.”

LinkedIn already aggregated Buyer Intent scores spanning 180 different intent signals, and it added four isolated visible Buyer Intent activities as part of an early beta in Q3.  LinkedIn plans to release additional Buyer Intent activities in future releases.  These specific activities are displayed with the associated account.  Furthermore, when the intent activity is public-facing, the individual completing the activity is also presented to the sales rep.

The four isolated Buyer Intent activities are

  1. Who’s followed a company
  2. Who’s visited your profile
  3. Who’s a new connection to yourself
  4. Who’s filled out a lead gen form
Reps can view LinkedIn buyer intent against their account list and then target accounts with high intent levels.

LinkedIn contends that its intent insights differ 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 said that it will offer 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.”

Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.

Current Account Lists and Buyer Intent are available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.

Buyer Activities capture account and contact-level intent.

LinkedIn did not expand the Buyer Intent categories in Q4 but added two new features: Filtering for Buyer Activities and new Buyer Intent account hover cards.  On Account Pages, sales reps can filter for activities by time range and level of decision-making ability.

Reps can also hover over accounts on Alerts, Lists, and Lead Pages to better evaluate an opportunity and refine account messaging.  The hover popup displays the level of buyer interest, recent news, and decision-makers changes “so sellers can easily double check any account’s level of intent as the work through Sales Navigator, without disrupting the current workflow.”

Hover cards provide account intelligence without disrupting research flow.

The New Executives at Saved Accounts List is an auto-generated list based on the saved accounts list.  The list identifies VP and CxO executives hired by tracked accounts.  While the executive view restricts the report to top-level executives, it doesn’t yet support filtering by function, a valuable report extension.

I’ve long extolled the value of identifying new executives at companies.  Fortunately, sales intelligence solutions are doing a better job of leveraging executive change insights in their products:

  • D&B Hoovers supports exec change alerts and triggers by job function.
  • ZoomInfo offers executive tracking of champions to new companies along with backfill contact recommendations at their old employer.
  • LinkedIn identifies new execs at saved accounts.

“We’ve found a lot of success internally being able to see when a new executive comes in,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions Head of Product Marketing Neil Khare explained to GZ Consulting during a briefing.  “They’re generally more willing to think about new vendors or have a mandate to change things up a little bit.  It’s a great time to capitalize on it, and we find that we’ve had some success internally on it, so we wanted to bring this up externally as well.”

LinkedIn also released a Recently Accepted Connections and InMails List highlighting individuals who responded to connection requests or InMails over the past thirty days.

The lists are available online from the list tab or via a weekly email digest.

“These are people that you are going to want to follow up with,” stated Khare.

Users can access two updated filters when building lists: Technology Used and Revenue.  Both filters have been improved with new data licensing agreements from undisclosed data partners. 

Accounts may be filtered by preset revenue ranges (vs. discrete values determined by the end-user).  All revenue data is in US Dollars.

To improve regional screening, users can paste a set of postal codes.

LinkedIn Sales Insights, LinkedIn’s DaaS enrichment service for sales ops, also benefited from expanded revenue data sourced from LinkedIn members, third-party vendors, and AI models.  95% of Fortune 500 and 75% of publicly traded companies display discrete revenue data.  More broadly, 60% of companies have at least a modeled revenue range.

To improve the Sales Insights workflow, LSI added exclusion filters for companies and personas, helping Sales Operations “focus on industries and geographies that are relevant to your business.”

LinkedIn Sales Insights now offers exclusion criteria to improve reporting filters.

6sense Unveils Conversational Email

The new 6Sense Conversational Email Campaign Builder

At the 6sense Breakthrough Conference, 6sense unveiled its new Conversational Email module. Conversational Email employs AI models, psychographics, technographics, intent data, and predictive analytics to deliver “hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant emails to qualify and convert leads to sales meetings.”

Conversational Email supports campaigns across functions and the buyers’ journey. Marketing can send “personalized peer-to-peer nurture emails from multiple AI personas, and Operations can systematize meeting conversion and scheduling for qualified accounts. Sales teams can operationalize best practices and “scale across segments much easier.”

Marketing can also deploy Conversational Email to revive dormant accounts, qualify and convert inbound leads, and boost webinar and event registrations, participation, and follow-up.

6sense claims that beta customers enjoyed a 50% reduction in deal cycle times for marketing-sourced opportunities and a 1.5X increase in average deal size.

“A look at the basic process Conversational AI uses to nurture leads and turn them into sales opportunities.”

AI tools include a Visual Conversation Flow Builder, Email Assistant, and Qualification and Sales Handover. The Email Assistant employs AI to “effortlessly engage the correct buying team members, schedule follow-up based on out-of-office replies, book meetings with the right owners, and send targeted content.”

Dynamic content consists of multivariate blocks tailored to specific keywords, segments, personas, or products for personalizing messages.

Additionally, Conversational Email supports automated workflow triggers based on account buying behavior and contact activity.

“This launch is one of our most significant product updates yet,” said 6sense CTO Viral Bajaria. “Every company has overlooked and underworked, yet high-quality, leads. Critical outreach happens too late or simply never at all, which leads to missed revenue opportunities. The early results from customers in our beta program using 6sense Conversational Email demonstrates the impact: reduction in deal cycles, increase in average deal size, and new pipeline generated. While others in the market focus on sending emails, we are the first to focus on writing relevant emails and responding in ways that lead to more quality pipeline, more efficiently.”

6sense Contextual Targeting improves engagement and recall.

6sense also rolled out Contextual Targeting, which places ads alongside similar digital content. A study by Spark Neuro found that contextually relevant ads generate 43% greater engagement and double the ad recall.

In addition, 6sense offers over 100 new custom contextual topics for B2B marketers. “Advertisers won’t need to settle to use contextual segments that are largely designed for consumer marketers,” stated 6sense.

6sense claimed three benefits to Contextual Targeting. It:

  • Respects user privacy by targeting audiences without using behavioral or data profiles
  • Provides ready-to-use contextual topics built specifically for B2B 
  • Eliminates wasted ad spend on buyers that aren’t likely to engage 

Another new feature is Campaign Forecasting which estimates a campaign’s daily audience, daily impressions, and daily spend. Campaign Forecasting helps marketers assess campaign budget and reach before launching the campaign.

6sense also announced at Breakthrough that a sales intelligence data application would be released in Q1. 6sense, which bought data company Slintel last October, will offer global contact data, intent data (3rd-party data, anonymous web visitor insights), firmographics, psychographics, and technographics. In addition, the “intuitive” UX will provide “actionable insights and [an] orchestration layer necessary to identify, prioritize and engage with accounts in-market.”

“With B2B buying committee members increasingly choosing to remain anonymous through most of their journey, sellers need insight to earlier signals for their sales outreach to be effective. With our latest advancement in 6sense Sales Intelligence, we bring industry-leading intent data, contact data, and AI insights to help sellers efficiently identify priority prospects, personalize their interactions, and take timely action with ease to drive meetings and conversion of pipeline to revenue.”

Amar Doshi, SVP of Product & UX at 6sense

The Breakthrough Conference was billed as “an inside look at best practices to leverage AI and big data to accelerate revenue generation efficiently.”

“The Proceed with Confidence focus of our 2022 Breakthrough event couldn’t be more timely. We heard from more than 50 sales and marketing speakers at this year’s event that 6sense Revenue AI is the must-have competitive edge they can’t grow without,” said 6sense CEO Jason Zintak. “B2B companies are losing revenue opportunities and leaving money on the table. To deliver a better buying experience in today’s selling environment, it’s imperative to leverage AI along with pre-intent data, intent data, and predictive analytics to know which accounts are in market to buy your product or service, when and how to target them, and what messages to deliver to best engage.”

ZoomInfo Expands its Technographics

ZoomInfo, which began as a technology sales intelligence service, has expanded its technographic intelligence to more than 30 million global companies.  The technographic dataset now spans 300 million company/tech pairings, whether that is a technology, platform, or programming language.

The firm, which has recently focused on sales and marketing enablement technology (e.g., Conversational Sales, Chatbots, Sales Engagement, Recruitment/HR) and Operations, has been quietly expanding its content coverage with announcements concerning company coverage and technographics in the past few weeks.

“Knowing which technologies your prospects use before you even pick up the phone gives sellers a tremendous head start,” said Kirti Patel, Senior Director of Engineering at ZoomInfo.  “With today’s economic headwinds, sales teams are looking for every opportunity to increase efficiency, and having access to a prospect’s tech stack can transform your go-to-market engine.”

ZoomInfo’s technographics intelligence is derived from over twenty data sources, including company websites, job postings, and customer testimonials.  Its taxonomy covers over 30,000 technologies.

ZoomInfo claims that nearly 90% of its active tech-to-company pairings have been updated within the past three months.

Technographics assists with prospecting, lead and account scoring, look-a-like modeling, and market analysis (e.g., Technology Market Share, ICP, and TAM).  It is also common for firms to target customers of partners for complementary pitches and competitors for takeaways. ZoomInfo supports alerting when technologies are added or dropped from prospects’ tech stacks.  In addition, its Workflow module automates sales and marketing outreach.

ZoomInfo provided a pair of ZoomInfo SalesOS screenshots to GZ Consulting with functional descriptions concerning their technographics capabilities:

Technographic Alerts: “Customers can subscribe to individual technologies to get alerts on what companies are Adding/Dropping/Discovering that technology. For Adds, we know the company recently began using that technology, whereas, for Discoveries, we believe the company has been using the technology for a while, but our systems are just discovering it for the first time.”
Company Specific Profile: “This image is just one technology that ZoomInfo uses. It shows the date of the last time we have seen evidence that ZoomInfo uses machine learning technology. We can only view one technology category at a time on a company’s profile. You’ll see to the left of the image all of the technology categories that we have ZoomInfo technologies for.  You can hover over each to get the date of the last evidence.”

Leadspace – SalesIntel Partnership

CDP and DaaS Platform Leadspace deepened its partnership with company and contacts vendor SalesIntel to deliver richer profiles.  The expanded profiles will assist with territory planning, campaign building, and ABM programs, helping convert a “company’s total addressable market into new opportunities and customers.”

Leadspace is promising at least a fifty-percent cut in third-party data licensing expenses for human-verified contacts, firmographics, and technographics.  “This frees companies to reinvest their savings into advanced AI-assisted technologies to fully optimize funnel conversion,” stated Leadspace.

Leadspace aggregates third-party data from over thirty vendors, with data spanning 70 million companies, 240 million buying centers, and 280 million business professionals.

Leadspace delivers “fully-enriched, 360-degree buyer profiles of current and high-performance lookalike customers” that align the company’s territories with its TAM and ICP.  It then activates ABM-derived audiences across multiple channels, including Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and LiveRamp. 

Leadspace offers connectors for major platforms, including Salesforce, MSD, Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot.

“Leadspace is redefining the performance of B2B sales and marketing teams.  We have over a decade of experience in delivering the most extensible B2B profiles in the industry.  And unlike other offerings, the Leadspace platform is data source agnostic, open, and extensible,” stated Alex Yoder, CEO of Leadspace.  “Companies large and small need and deserve complete and active profiles, but today many companies struggle to keep their profiles up to date and complete.  We’ve worked with SalesIntel for several years, and this expansion in our partnership to include human-verified B2B contacts and technographic data in the Leadspace B2B graph is a testament to their being the leading vendor for the most affordable direct dial and accurate contact data in the industry.”

SalesIntel employs a global research network of nearly 2,000 editors who double-verify its data each quarter, ensuring a 95% accuracy level of its contacts.  It also provides firmographics and technographics.

“At SalesIntel, we are committed to providing the best sales intelligence available for revenue teams of all sizes.  Leadspace requires the highest quality data to fuel its platform, so this partnership expansion comes naturally.  We are honored to be a trusted provider,” said SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “With customers having access to accurate contact data and over 200 million technographic data points, they will be equipped with the most accurate insights so they can expand reach, grow pipeline, and increase close rates.”

G2 Aiming for $100M ARR by End of Year

Nathan Latka interviews Godard Abel

On Nathan Latka’s podcast, Godard Abel, CEO of G2, said that he expects to hit $100 million ARR before the end of the year.  G2, which raised $157M at a $1.1B valuation in June 2021 (Series D), grew at 40% over the past year.  At the time of its Series D, its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was $55 million.

G2 maintains a product/vendor taxonomy for its review site, with vendors identifying their product categories.  “If you’re a software vendor, you want it to be right on G2,” said Abel.  That way, its seven million monthly visitors can properly discover a vendor’s offerings.

Along with categorizing vendors, G2 editors determine the key features for each product category and let customers rate these capabilities.

The number of G2 listings grew 48% over the last year.  Its fifty-person research team collaborates with its “community of vendors” to maintain vendor and product profiles.

G2 also licenses its taxonomy to partners and investors.  For example, ServiceNow licenses the G2 taxonomy for its ITS Management tool for categorizing apps.  Abel also noted that around fifty of the “World’s leading SaaS investors” have licensed G2 data to help understand the SaaS competitive landscape and adjacent markets.

G2 has additional revenue streams.  It offers second-party opted-in intent data and a G2 Track service for tracking SaaS expenses.

Nathan Latka interviews SaaS CEOs and posts them to his podcast. This data is then loaded into his database of SaaS metrics. As he regularly reinterviews executives, there is often historical ARR and employment data. The database is a freemium service with limited free data.

G2 Revenue (Source: GetLatka.com)

HG Insights Platform 2.0

The Opportunity Generator assembles targeted lists based on fitness and intent.

Market Intelligence vendor HG Insights released version 2.0 of its platform to deliver the “actionable insights” technology vendors need to better “understand their markets in-depth, make decisions, and Go-To-Market (GTM) with precision and confidence.”  Platform 2.0 supports technographics, install data, spend data, twelve million company profiles, contract intelligence, and intent signals for nine million global companies.

“The HG Insights Platform goes beyond simple high-level market reports to provide business leaders with actionable insights to make successful Go-To-Market decisions,” said Robert Fox, CTO of HG Insights.  “Customers are already using HG Insights to allocate resources more effectively, prioritize the right product initiatives, and give their sales and marketing teams the account details they need to pursue the best opportunities—and now we are building on these capabilities with Platform 2.0.  I am excited at the speed of innovation the new platform launch unlocks as HG Insights maintains itself as the market leader of technology intelligence.”

HG Platform 2.0 supports modules for company profiling, marketing intelligence, contextual intent, and opportunity generation.

Platform 2.0 offers self-serviceable intent insights where marketers identify accounts with the highest current propensity to buy based on market signals.  Intent Insights begins by matching each vendor’s Ideal Customer Profile and intent topics to define a set of target accounts.  Account scoring then ranks the target accounts based on a combination of intent signals and market fit (firmographics and technographics).

Marketers can then employ IT spend intelligence to prioritize accounts by budgets, construct equitable sales territories, and analyze market spending trends.

The platform is supported by a “ground up” architectural refresh that improves HG Insights’ ability to scale up its data and insights delivery.  In Q4, the firm plans to release a new API and native Salesforce integration served by the new platform.

Other platform features include improved account scoring, saved search lists, account match logic enhancements, self-serve customer reporting, and UX enhancements.

Install data enhancements include company hierarchy mapping and “new trending features that capture intensity trending over time.”

“These improvements give a more dynamic experience to our technology install data and can answer a broader variety of questions about product usage,” said Darcy Moss, Director of Product Marketing.  “Data coverage and precision have improved—you are now able to profile installs at a global, country, and city/state level.  Intensity Trending and Momentum deliver an improved understanding of technology usage.”

HG Insights, which began as a technographics vendor, now supports modules for opportunity generation, market intelligence, account profiling, and contextual intent.  The Market Intelligence module, released in early 2021, helps marketing and strategy analysts size markets by IT spend, tech installs, firmographics, geography, company size, etc.  It also lets them:

  • Analyze vendor penetration and identify threats, trends, and opportunities
  • Allocate resources and territories more efficiently
  • Identify untapped market potential with whitespace analysis

Contextual Intent, an add-on service, combines technology install data and buyer intent signals “to create a new scoring and filtering experience for laser-focused company targeting.”  HG Insights processes two billion weekly intent signals spanning over 120 million verified tech installs.  Its technology taxonomy support over 14,000 products, solutions, and services.

Contextual intent helps identify prospects researching or evaluating a product that is

  • Not detected in a current install
  • In a category where HG Insights has detected the installation of another product from the same vendor
  • A potential displacement of a competitor’s offering

HG Insights expanded its IT spend and intelligence insights when it acquired Intricately back in March.  Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings.  Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure.  Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.

Intent Activity identifies the signal strength, signal location, and buyer’s journey stage.

D&B Hoovers Expands Content

Dun & Bradstreet continues to expand the content it publishes in D&B Hoovers.  Recent enhancements include building out its companies, contacts, and technographics.

D&B Hoovers profiles nearly 250 million unique, active companies and over twenty million corporate linkages, including branch-level links.  New fields include Site Sales, Global Sales, Site Employees, and Global Employees.

Contact coverage also continues to grow, hitting 290 million.  In addition, email and direct-dial fill rates have significantly improved, both growing 9X since Q1 2021.  As a result, D&B Hoovers now provides 40 million emails and 20 million direct dials. 

Build-a-List now supports a Contact Accuracy Score when prospecting for contacts, letting reps “select the email accuracy that’s right for each outreach, lending flexibility for both precision and volume.”  For example, for general campaigns, marketers would select emails with the highest levels of deliverability; still, reps may select lower-scoring contacts when reaching out to their target persona within their ICP.

Other recent enhancements include website content searching, a UI refresh with responsive design, and support for fifteen European and Asian languages.

D&B Hoover’s now provides a broader set of sizing variables for companies and locations.

D&B Hoover’s also expanded its technographics, with company coverage extended by 359% since Q1 2021.  In addition, Dun & Bradstreet grew its technology vendor coverage by 54% and its tracked technology products by 5.3 million.

Along with a deep set of companies and contact profiles, D&B Hoover’s offers public company financials, US SEC filings, UK Companies House filings and DASH reports, European registered company financials, analyst reports, industry market research and overviews, corporate family trees, competitors, company news, intent data, and event triggers.

HG Insights Acquires Intricately

Technology Intelligence vendor HG Insights acquired fellow data vendor Intricately.  The acquisition provides HG Insights with global cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data, “adding to HG’s market-leading optimization of the world’s top technology brands’ Go-To-Market.”

The entire Intricately team has joined HG Insights, including CEO Michael Pollack and CTO Fima Leshinsky.  Pollack assumed the role of EVP of Market Innovation, and Leshinsky was named an SVP of Product.

HG Insights’ NLP gathers technology installation and spend intelligence for eleven million global companies, capturing 96% of the world’s total IT spend and intelligence on over 15,600 installed products.

“We started Intricately to provide decision-makers with actionable data and insights they could use to plot a course through the ever-expanding Cloud universe.  At the time, we saw a world with individuals relying on gut instincts, teams making ‘best guesses,’ and organizations making big bets on circumspect data.  We started this business with the goal of making the unknown known.  Our vision was, and has always been, to be the authoritative source of truth for digital product adoption, usage, and spend.”

Intricately Founders Fima Leshinsky and Michael Pollack

Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings.  Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure.  Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.

“Intricately provides unique and actionable insights that enable cloud sellers to increase velocity by focusing on the highest potential opportunities,” said Pollack.  “As the workforces of global companies become increasingly distributed, cloud spend and product adoption have become key indicators when assessing potential buyers’ likelihood of purchasing and deploying new products.  Intricately’s intelligence, now part of HG Insights, is uniquely positioned to lead the market on this trend.”

Intricately Cloud Intelligence

Intricately’s customers include the top three cloud companies.  In addition, the acquisition provides “real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack.”

“Now, with the addition of Intricately, we can provide real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack to provide richer insights for better decisions and faster results,” said HG Insights CEO Elizabeth Cholawsky.  “Our customers have come to rely on HG Insights as an indispensable input into their most strategic decisions such as market sizing, whitespace analysis, and territory planning as well as for fundamental activities including opportunity prioritization and account-based marketing intelligence.”

HG Insights and Intricately offer complementary spend data.  HG Insights focuses on projected spend for forecasting and go-to-market planning while Intricately measures actual spend for benchmarking and plan measurement.  Combined, the companies offer “unmatched spend insights in the Cloud Market that support the full lifecycle of Plan, Optimize, and Execute to empower sales and marketing organizations.”

HG Insights listed a series of technical benefits:

  • Richer combined datasets to operationalize the planning, targeting, and messaging to prospects based on technology adoption and usage
  • Improved precision of workload volumes, estimated spends, and the related technologies running on cloud-based infrastructure
  • Expansion of insights into customer-built cloud and self-hosted applications
  • Detailed location insights providing a view into both the location of consumption and/or physical infrastructure to power hyper-focused Go-to-Market strategies
  • Real-time detection of changes to a company’s cloud application and technology strategy

Business professionals can leverage HG Insights expanded intelligence to evaluate their TAM/SAM/SOM, prioritize ABM campaigns, establish “equitable and efficient” sales territories, and determine which prospects have the highest propensity to buy.  In addition, sales reps can identify prospects evaluating other vendors or shifting their usage patterns, signals that an account is at risk.

“With this new intelligence in its offering, HG will provide game-changing insights that transform our customers’ Go-To-Market initiatives and accelerate growth,” HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss told GZ Consulting.  “Strategy, marketing, sales, and operations teams can leverage this insight to answer critical business decisions with greater confidence.”

The addition of Intricately Cloud insights helps answer the question, “What is Coming?”

“By adding Intricately’s market-leading workload and usage data, we’ll give our customers the most detailed, unique picture available of an account’s technology strategy; not just what they have, but why they have it, how they’re using it, and ultimately, what they’re likely to do next.  It’s a competitive advantage unmatched in the market,” stated Moss.

Intricately was founded in 2014 and is based in San Francisco.  LinkedIn states that it has 54 employees, having grown its headcount by 35% in the past year and 93% over the past two.  However, its employment plateaued last November.

“At this time, we will be business as usual until the transition is completed,” stated Moss.  “This includes retaining current office locations.”

HG Insights did not disclose any size or growth details.  It also did not disclose the acquisition price. Intricately is HG Insights’ second acquisition.  In 2018, the firm acquired Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.

TechTarget: Priority Engine Enhancements

TechTarget announced a set of enhancements to its Priority Engine Sales Intelligence platform, including second-party intent data from its BrightTALK digital event platform and a refreshed user experience. As a result, TechTarget now provides intent data for 32 million opted-in technology researchers and purchasers across twice as many accounts.

Millions of BrightTALK contacts are fully integrated into Priority Engine, providing intelligence around individuals actively researching technology purchases at BrightTALK webinars, virtual events, and videos.  The expanded content provides richer intent data with additional messaging hooks for sales reps.

Prospect-level insights include content preferences, recently viewed content, and each buying committee member’s top interests.

Prospect Insights provide rich details for messaging.

BrightTALK was acquired twelve months ago.  BrightTALK hosts 30,000 new webinars and videos each year, providing multi-media content that complements TechTarget’s text-based research content.  Prospect-level BrightTALK intent data and buyer contact intelligence are now being combined with second-party intent data from TechTarget’s 140+ enterprise technology media sites, bringing the combined pool of buyers and influencers to 32 million.  As these individuals are opted-in, intent data can be tied to the individual instead of the account, allowing for improved messaging and targeting.  Not only is the enterprise software topic collected, but TechTarget gathers competitors under consideration and buying journey stage.  Furthermore, opted-in contact data ensures that the shared contact intelligence is GDPR and CCPA compliant.

BrightTALK Prospect Insights include webinar registrations, views, view times, webinar types, and titles.

BrightTALK Intent data indicates which content was viewed and the duration the demand unit member spent viewing the content.

TechTarget noted that buyers and influencers have distinct digital research styles, with some preferring multi-media content and others opting for white papers and related text-based reports and articles.  Thus, bringing in BrightTALK significantly expanded TechTarget’s ability to identify buyer intent based on different learning preferences.

“Despite strong similarities in overall audience makeup (company size, industry, and job title/function are remarkably consistent), there’s only a 10%-20% overlap in members between the databases, depending on geo,” wrote TechTarget SVP of Products Andrew Briney in April.

“Learning preference and behavior is quite different for members of BrightTALK,” continued Briney.  “While the content topics, focus, and quality is [SIC] very similar to what’s offered on the TechTarget network, BrightTALK members prefer the immersive, interactive learning experiences delivered by webinars (85%) and videos (61%) over downloadable PDF content like whitepapers (47%) and e-Books (42%). Given this preference, it’s not surprising BrightTALK members average more than 30 minutes in view-time per webinar/video.”

Priority Engine Personalized Rankings view

The enhancements also provide insights into “overall buyer content preferences (content type and topic), and interactions with customer content across multiple channels help inform more personalized sales outreach and marketing engagement strategies.”

“Priority Engine delivers the actionable purchase intent data our customers need to drive superior performance.  This new release gets exponentially more data into their hands and gives them the ability to deliver customized experiences their marketers and sellers need to thrive.”

TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia

UI enhancements include a new view that calls out “untapped, high potential accounts” for initial engagement in a rep’s territory.  There is also a new timeline for viewing account journeys and recent engagement.  The new timeline helps reps “easily monitor buying changes to better optimize pipeline, identify cross-sell/upsell opportunities and grow revenue.”

Other UI changes include a set of shortcuts located in the left-side navigation bar.  The shortcuts display the following user views:

  • Top Accounts – The 500 most active accounts and prospects (default view)
  • Untapped Potential – Accounts or prospects with whom the rep has not yet interacted in Priority Engine
  • Viewed your Content – Accounts or prospects that have viewed or downloaded company content syndicated through TechTarget’s content syndication program
  • Visited your Website – Accounts that have visited the company’s website (Inbound Converter)
  • Confirmed Projects – Any projects that TechTarget has confirmed are active in the rep’s territory based on direct outreach
  • Favorites – Accounts or prospects that you have selected to favorite in Priority Engine

Finally, the platform now contains separate modules that support sales and marketing use cases.

The Highlights view provides buying journey interactions and new contacts at top accounts.