Global Database Build a List supports expanded growth, ownership, and industry variables.
UK-based Sales Intelligence vendor Global Database continues to expand its content and functionality. Recent platform enhancements include expanded prospecting variables, industry coding, and list enrichment.
New screening variables include
Annual Growth: Turnover, Headcount, EBITDA, Net Profit, Liabilities, and Exports
Ownership: Parents, Number of subsidiaries, Foreign parent, Number of shareholders
Industry: European and North American industry codes, Industry Keywords
International SIC and NACE codes are available across the full company universe. Global Database also implemented an NLP tool that crawls company websites and identifies keywords and business descriptions. This descriptive content is then mapped to over 100,000 industry keywords.
“The SIC code is outdated when it comes to new industry verticals, such as Big Data or E-commerce, and if you are looking for such companies by SIC Code, they will be classified as: 63990 – Other information service activities n.e.c., explained CEO Nicolae Buldumac to GZ Consulting.
Global Database now supports company and contact list enrichment for Salesforce and MS Dynamics. Users upload a list that is matched against its reference database and enriched with over 80 variables and match score confidence. Matching employs registration numbers, corporate names, domains, phone, postal codes, etc.
Global Database also provides an interactive report with match rates and segmentation. Enrichment analytics include match rates, list averages, company status distribution, turnover distribution, top five companies, and pie charts for employment, years in business, and industry. A location map is also displayed.
Other data tools include CRM maintenance, APIs, and web forms with auto-population.
The Global Database universe now spans 130 million companies and 118 million contacts:
Global Database Counts as of October 2021.
Most of its data is from trade registries, publicly available sources, an in-house data research team, and a few data vendor partnerships. Direct emails are available for 17 million contacts and mobile numbers for 1.6 million. If a contact does not have an email or phone number, Global Database integrates with two data vendors, where this information is requested via API in real-time.
Global Database continues to expand its universe of credit reports, with instant Business Credit Reports now available for 350 million companies. If a country does not support instant reports, customers may request a new investigation from on-the-ground resources. These reports are delivered within five to seven business days.
Credit reports are priced between £19 and £80, with the UK and Irish reports at the low end. Most continental European credit reports are priced between £35 and £40. North American reports are also priced at £40.
UK Sales Intelligence vendor Cognism was named to Tech Nation’s Future Fifty 2021 list. CEO James Isilay called the past year “a year of incredible transformation” for Cognism as it grew revenue by 90% and closed in on $20 million ARR. 2021 is the second consecutive year that Cognism made the exclusive Future Fifty list.
Cognism was also named one of the top 15 UK Startups by LinkedIn. The firm continued hiring through the pandemic, with LinkedIn listing 277 employees in the UK, US, and Europe. Cognism has been rapidly building out its sales team, growing it 165% over the past year to 90 headcount. Its support team grew 58% over the past year to 40 CSMs. Cognism also doubled its product management and IT teams.
London-based Cognism grew its headcount 63% over the past year and 115% over the past two. It’s ARR is nearing $20M.
Cognism plans to retain a flexible working environment and recruit talent outside of its primary office locations. LinkedIn lists 23 positions in London, Boston, New York, Germany, Croatia, and South Africa.
On Monday, Cognism announced Diamond Data, “a new standard in B2B data quality.” It emphasized that its contacts are accurate, compliant, and phone-verified. Mobile numbers are phone-verified and checked against global do not call (DNC) lists. Cognism contacts are GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Cognism promises to “minimise inefficiencies due to inaccurate job titles and incorrect / misdialed numbers and create a leaner, faster sales process.” Cognism offers revenue teams “unrestricted access to prospect data” available through its platform and via CRM and SEP connectors.
A new Diamonds-on-Demand request feature supports on-demand phone verification. Users simply click on a Diamond Verify button to initiation validation. A diamond appears on headshots of verified contacts.
“As a company we are constantly researching and identifying new opportunities and partnerships to ensure our platform delivers the best possible results for the highly competitive B2B market landscape. Diamond Data is just that – the best you can get. It is always evolving, and we want to assure our clients that they can target their prospects in confidence, leaving the compliance and data accuracy to us.”
Cognism CEO James Isilay
Diamond Data is immediately available.
Cognism is also delivering Bombora’sintent dataset for identifying in-market buyers and related contact information. Intent data is available as a screening select and displayed as a build-a-list Heat Map.
Cognism’s new Diamond Data offering.
Finally, Cognism announced that industry veteran Phil Garlick joined their board. Garlick served as the VP of Corporate Development at DiscoverOrg and President of OneSource Information Services.
German Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot released version 2.0 of its TARGET prospecting service with a refreshed UI, improved data quality, and AI tools for ICP and segmentation analysis.
“If you want to digitize your sales processes and save a lot of time, money, and nerves, you can’t ignore Echobot,” said CEO Bastian Karweg. “TARGET 2.0 inspires the everyday sales life of our customers – the new version is fast, intuitive to use, and simply fun.”
Echobot has set its product vision based on the “first principles of data” delivered through its service. “For data to be useful, it has to be high quality, connected, and fully compliant,” said Karweg.
The first step was unifying their database across regions and datatype and removing data silos within the platform. Echobot implemented a “unified, nested data index” that improved query times up to ten-fold and allowed for enhanced switching between company and contact results.
Users no longer need to build company and contact lists separately. Instead, build-a-list results are displayed as tabs, allowing users to analyze both company and contact results without requiring them to rekey their query.
Echobot also implemented a new Email Validation Engine (EVA) that “eliminates stale records” and implements mail server and pattern checking to improve data quality. The EVA reduces bounce rates by up to thirty percent.
Echobot licensed company records directly from trade registers and implemented a “True Compliance” process.
“For your outreach to be truly GDPR compliant, you not only need a Legitimate Interest but also be mindful of the preferences of the people you are trying to contact,” stated Karweg. “Using Echobot, each contact record comes with a public source URL so you can be 100% confident when a prospect asks you, ‘Hey, where did you get my data from?’”
Echobot Job Title Suggestions
Echobot implemented AI to assist users, building a subject taxonomy that covers over 100,000 topics and industry keywords. TARGET 2.0 sports a keyword type-ahead tool that “guides you towards the right queries and also intelligently suggests alternative keywords or job titles you also might want to include in your search.”
The firm’s new segmentation analysis is their “most advanced AI” that builds a company vector model for clustered analysis of highly similar companies from uploaded files. The clusters identify similar companies for downloading to the desktop or uploading to the CRM. Thus, users can upload their Ideal Customer Profile and expand it with similar companies. The ICP is also used to score prospects and sort them by priority.
“Echobot uses a new company vector model for the first time in addition to rigid industry codes. The technology is based on machine learning and makes it possible to select companies in a fine-grained manner according to thousands of specialist areas. The assignment takes place automatically on the basis of text content that is associated with the respective company. This means that if you are looking for industries, Echobot now offers an immense wealth of detail and can thus easily find even high-precision target groups. With the help of so-called cross joins, filters of different data areas can be combined with each other in real-time. This completely eliminates the time-consuming storage of interim results.”
Echobot Press Release (Translated from German)
TARGET 2.0 supports a broad set of screening variables:
Industry – Industry codes or keywords.
Keyword
Contacts – Department, Level, Title
Trigger Events
Location – Region and Radius
Company Size
Financials
Technographics – Software and Systems
Firmographics
Data Completeness
Their instant access to data allows for complete data visibility without slowing down users with credits to display contact details. In addition, the contract includes a minimum of 10,000 monthly record uploads or downloads with a FLAT-RATE Guarantee that provides an additional 5,000 monthly data records after consuming the EXPORT quota. The guarantee ensures budgeting stability while providing export flexibility should the marketing department consume their entire download quota mid-year.
Echobot pricing starts at €999 per month for up to three users. This price is introductory and will increase for new customers in 2022.
Echobot supports four countries – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the UK – and two languages – German and English. The Echobot roadmap includes “intelligent” email alerts, “helpful” trigger events, and “smart” campaign management. Additional languages and countries are also in development.
This morning, Artesian Solutions and DueDil announced the merger of their two firms. Both vendors serve the B2B FinTech/RegTech/SalesTech spaces with products that assist their 700 customers in onboarding clients, performing KYC/AML checks, prospecting, and monitoring customers.
The merger took place six weeks ago and was described as a partnership at the time. However, they held off on the formal announcement until “everything was aligned.”
Artesian/DueDil is currently working on a combined brand identity that reflects the offerings of both companies. For this blog, I am, therefore, referring to them as “the merged company.”
Over eighty percent of their revenue comes from the financial services sector (Banking and Insurance), with products covering the UK, Ireland, US, and Canada. While Artesian and DueDil serve the same market, they have only eight joint customers, providing significant upsell and cross-sell opportunities for their primary offerings:
Engage – Artesian’s Sales Intelligence offering supports prospecting, customer research, financials, Companies House images, industry research, and high precision news tagging and alerting. Other tools include the Ready mobile app (meeting prep and meeting chat) and CRM connectors for Salesforce and MS Dynamics.
Connect – Artesian’s compliance and onboarding platform supports company screening, customer due diligence, and a configurable decision engine that ingests third-party data. As a compliance and decisioning platform, Connect displays early warning indicators, supports KYC and AML checks, and delivers adverse media alerts.
Artesian Connect includes a bespoke rules-processing engine that captures client know-how, including business rules, sales preferences, prospecting criteria, and onboarding checks. Connect supports Artesian’s Premium Data feeds, the B.I.G., and customer-licensed third-party data integrations.
B.I.G. – DueDil’s Business Information Graph spans 270 million relationships, including companies, directors, shareholders, and subsidiaries. Roughly thirty percent of the relationships are curated. The graph is updated three or four times a day.
DueDil APIs – DueDil’s premium API also provides the capability to access B.I.G. data and plug it into existing systems “quickly and seamlessly” to power automated KYC / KYB and onboarding journeys.
Artesian supports sales intelligence (Engage) and FSI onboarding and compliance (Connect).
The companies have complementary capabilities. Artesian Solutions offers mobile tools, CRM connectors, business events, a rules engine, and web applications. Conversely, DueDil has focused on a set of APIs and relationship data.
“Our new company will be able to make strategic investments for sustainable and profitable growth, remaining agile to new opportunities whilst keeping focused on leveraging our newly combined strength to drive greater value for our customers.”
Artesian+DueDil CEO Andrew Yates
“If you can imagine the Big Information Graph, the APIs with their published endpoints that make them really quick and effective to integrate, a rules engine, and then a host of really powerful frontline applications, and middle-office applications, that’s what we mean by end-to-end,” explained Yates to GZ Consulting. “There’s a market in the FinTech space, which is ‘just give me the data as it is’ as a service prepackaged with rules to do things like digital onboarding, straight-through processing, and automated underwriting. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got people-centric relationship management. People not only want to get access to the insight and the data, but they need the applications that link all of that together and link that back to the customer.”
“We’ve been very effective at helping our customers find the right customers, and more laterally, using things like screening technology and forensic analysis with the rules engine,” continued Yates. “DueDil has been focused on the onboarding journey and the remediation journey, so onboard them faster and keep them for life.”
There are two ways that Artesian adds value to commodity data, said the merged company’s COO Justin Fitzpatrick, who formerly led DueDil. The first is by creating “proprietary, derived data” such as relationship connections. The second is to embed “business logic around those data points” to answer “business-critical questions.”
“We can provide data that helps them check that they can onboard the customer. But at the end of the day, ideally, our clients want to be able to shortcut that process and know whether they can safely onboard that customer,” continued Fitzpatrick. “And so that’s where we started developing things like our integrated KYB endpoint, which pulls together the different bits of data, runs logic and rules over it, and spits out a sort of Pass/Fail/More type answer so that people can kind of have direct responses to the business questions that they’re asking. Being able to layer Artesian Connect’s programmable rules engine on the API was a really attractive proposition for us.”
The firms have competed against each other for around a decade but saw less of each other over the past three or four years as they focused on meeting complementary market requirements. While DueDil focused on its API strategy and B.I.G., Artesian focused on event triggers, Artesian Connect’s rules engine, and workflow tools.
“Over the past decade, DueDil and Artesian have delivered some of the most innovative and successful technology solutions, tackling the financial service market’s biggest client lifecycle challenges. We will continue to draw on this experience together to push the boundaries even further.”
Artesian+DueDil COO Justin Fitzpatrick
Fitzpatrick argued that official registries such as the UK’s Companies House “do a great job” as “electronic filing cabinets to make sure that people file their accounts on time.” Still, they were never designed to connect the dots between “company information, director information, and shareholders.”
Fitzpatrick argues that registry data is, therefore, a commodity, with the company adding value through disambiguating the filings, matching data, identifying relationships, facilitating onboarding, client monitoring, and delivering client and prospect intelligence via an API. For example, they disambiguate about two million director profiles in the UK, ensuring that all John Smith listings are correctly matched, and that name variants are properly managed.
The merged company will continue to focus on Directors and relationships but will not become a contacts database with emails and phone numbers akin to ZoomInfo or Cognism.
“We absolutely will cover that from a regulatory standpoint,” said Yates. “Directors, officers, non-exec directors, how those people link together, entities linked together. These are absolutely critical questions that regulated industries that are trying to engage with customers need answers to.”
CEO Andrew Yates will head the merged company with Justin Fitzpatrick assuming the role of COO. The broader leadership team contains individuals from both companies. The new firm has between seventy and eighty employees, “and that number will be growing.” The combined turnover is in “double-digit millions” of pounds.
The strategy is to focus on the “multiple 1000s” of FinTech, financial services, insurance, and insurance broking institutions” that require “access to our combined capabilities.” Not only are there significant upsell and cross-sell opportunities, but “the actual number of institutions relative to the total addressable market…is still very large,” said Yates.
“When you bring the data smarts in at the next level, you start to be able to really give people a laser-guided focus in not only who the right company is, but exactly how they should engage,” expanded Yates. “If we can forensically analyze the data and combine it with rules, we can provide an engagement signal, which is essentially a next best action or recommendation as to what the individual should do – it goes way beyond giving them a piece of killer insight or a set of financials or some short animation around the structure and the way they’re organized and the ultimate beneficiary.”
Customers will also benefit from the “much more integrated experience” that unites the frontline teams and back office with a shared set of data, insights, and APIs. The goal is to “find the right customers, onboard them faster, and keep them for life.”
Yates is promising that Artesian Customers will have access to the B.I.G. and DueDil’s APIs “in a matter of weeks.”
“What’s emerging is a new company that allows more functionality, more value, and more freedom for our clients,” stated Yates. Artesian Customers will “have one of the most extensive and accurate views of every UK and Irish company at their fingertips, in real-time, and available instantly.”
Venture Capital investors Notion Capital and Octopus Ventures backed the merger, stating that “the UK is one of the leading financial centres in the world, supported by a technology ecosystem built around trust, security, and innovation. The combination of Artesian and DueDil creates an exciting growth company chasing an enormous opportunity in the FinTech market. We are thrilled to play our part in supporting them on that journey.”
Artesian is coming off of a “strong” H1 marked by profitable, double-digit growth. It added three significant customers, including two banks. Its gross retention rate was 94%, and its net retention was over 100%. Artesian has a track record of efficient revenue operations. Its LTV/CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost) was 9X last year, indicating an efficient sales engine with low churn.
I interviewed Andrew Yates back in 2018. He discussed technological disruption, AI, and data insights.
I am pleased to announce that my latest Sales Intelligence company profile is available for those looking to purchase a solution for the UK or D-A-CH region. I used the same methodology for Echobot that I employed when I wrote my book “2017 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors.” The idea was to write an objective analysis (hence sections on weaknesses and competitors), not simply a puff piece. I work closely with the vendor to describe content, functionality, connectors, roadmap, strengths, and weaknesses.
As Echobot is based in Germany, I also wrote about their GDPR compliance steps.
While vendors have input, I retain editorial control. I believe that retaining objectivity makes these reports more valuable for vendors as it both provides a roadmap for their future product evolution and provides prospects with a realistic view of a product’s strengths and weaknesses.
Echobot is making the profile available from their website.
Here is my summary from the report:
UK vendors have been launching sales intelligence and B2B DaaS solutions for the European market over the past several years. It is a welcome sign that European vendors now have the confidence to compete in the UK market. One of these vendors is Germany-based Echobot. Echobot is a promising new sales intelligence and B2B DaaS entrant to the UK market. It is the leading sales and marketing intelligence service in the D-A-CH region and enters the UK with a broad set of sales and marketing services. Echobot offers deep coverage of UK and D-A-CH companies, GDPR-compliant contacts, and signals (event triggers), delivered via web browser applications and extensions, mobile apps, Salesforce, and Zapier webhooks.
Along with company profiles, Echobot offers contacts, emails, news, social media mentions, and signals.
CONNECT (sales intelligence) and TARGET (list building) were recently launched in the UK market, but have been available as German-language solutions for the D-A-CH market for several years. As such, the company should move quickly to address any V1.0 bugs and fill content gaps. Since launching in September 2020, Echobot has integrated Google Translate into its platform for free-form text translation and refined its sales trigger precision.
DATACARE provides B2B DaaS hygiene services that verify, enrich, and append company and contact data. DATACARE flags duplicates, verifies emails, updates company names and addresses, and appends missing fields. DATACARE was launched in December.
Michael Levy, GZ Consulting Principal, “Echobot Company Profile,” 2021.
Rhetorik announced a UK expansion pack to its NetFinder+ technology sales intelligence service. The expansion pack adds 90,000 companies and 200,000 contacts and emails to Rhetorik’s UK coverage. NetFinder+ data includes firmographics, contacts, and technographics.
The Rhetorik Technology Classification (RTC), a proprietary taxonomy, spans 7,000 vendors across ten million installs. Rhetorik’s technographics cover
Installed IT assets such as telecoms equipment, networking devices, and server and desktop hardware
Software products from traditional enterprise applications and operating systems to new cloud platforms and vertical industry applications
Services and consumables suppliers
“We have invested heavily in our international coverage, now offering sales and marketing intelligence across 30+ countries, but the UK remains the largest and fastest-growing IT market in Europe for a range of enterprise software and cloud services. This fully GDPR-compliant SMB expansion enables marketers to reach deeper into that market than ever before.”
Rhetorik CEO Meredith Amdur
The expanded coverage profiles UK companies with five to 100 employees. Rhetorik expects to “significantly” grow their coverage this year. They have a “stand-by database” of companies and contacts “awaiting final cleaning and compliance. “Existing clients will gain free access for three months to all the new accounts and contacts that meet their existing data criteria,” wrote CRO Kevin Savage.
Rhetorik covers Western European along with
Former Soviet Union: The Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia
Balkans: Slovenia, Croatia, and Greece
Eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania
Additional EMEA countries include the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and South Africa, with ten more countries in development.
In January, Rhetorik released its DataCliniq DaaS enrichment service for maintaining data hygiene. DataCliniq diagnoses, cleanses, and enriches account, contact, and lead records. It supports both batch file uploads and channel partner integrations with data marketplaces. The service also directly integrates with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, and Marketo.
Continuing my coverage of the new Artesian Connect platform [Part I].
Metro Bank, an early customer, deployed Connect for customer onboarding and back-book screening, complementing their Artesian Engage deployment:
“We started working with Artesian to explore ways we could introduce greater efficiency to the customer onboarding journey. We loved the idea of being able to aggregate data from a number of different sources and map our risk appetite to Artesian’s rules framework to flag issues immediately. The result meant we could deliver a process which in some cases was 94% quicker than our existing process.”
Ronan Heeran, Financial Crime Risk & Control Manager at Metro Bank
QBE, an early insurance adopter, employed Connect for underwriting and COVID-risk checks, delivering consistent decisioning across its 200 underwriters. According to QBE Director of Underwriting David Jones, Connect’s configurability let QBE be “proactive, rather than reactive, to changes in data for client assessment.”
Along with a rich set of news event monitoring and triggers, Artesian provides a broad set of Experian UK data, including financials, Companies House images, Gazette filings, Directors and Shareholders, Mortgages and County Court Judgements, Family Trees, and Ultimate Beneficiaries. Artesian recently added Irish datasets from Experian. They also offer US and Canadian profiles from a highly credible provider.
Clients can access Artesian Premium Data in Connect or opt to retain preferred vendors. Connect also provides API connectors for Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, Equifax, Refinitiv, LDC, and Graydon, with more data integrations planned. Many financial services clients opt to feed their legacy PEP (politically exposed persons) and sanctions list vendors into Connect.
Connect supports a business rules-engine, development toolkit, and scripting engine. Users can either work with Artesian’s technical consultants to define models or build their own decisioning and customer support tools. Artesian employs a “3-D” solution process: Discover, Design, Demonstrate. The 3-D process, combined with the Connect platform, allows Artesian to build complex business requirements in days or weeks, significantly faster than third-party developers.
Artesian has trademarked the term “Know-How Equation,” which describes their method of capturing “collective expertise” to “transform efficiency, efficacy, and consistency of frontline and middle office teams.” The equation is represented as
The Know-How Equation captures a company’s knowledge about its customers, business, and market in the Artesian rules-engine. Artesian then processes structured and unstructured data to display “impactful insights and risk intelligence needed to deliver the ultimate in business acumen.”
“Artesian Connect can deliver transformational results in client acquisition, client onboarding, risk and compliance monitoring, and relationship management. With Connect, modern frontline banking teams can rapidly merge disparate data sources, create bespoke rules for risk selection utilising rich firmographic data and, most importantly, deliver insight from unstructured data that paints a much deeper picture for client assessment.”
Artesian CEO Andrew Yates
Artesian has also updated its Engage homepage to provide a custom briefing book to clients. Features include dynamic Connect calculations, advanced engagement signals, historical screening, and account followers. Customers can opt for either a data-first view or a news-first view.
Like many of its peers, Artesian Solutions has thrived during the pandemic. Their mobile push notifications have had high usage during WFH, and financial services firms have increased platform utilization due to economic dislocation and CBILS checks. According to Yates, renewals remain strong, with gross retention in the 90s and net retention around 110%.
The firm has long been profitable, with a 9X LTV/CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost). Furthermore, customers have been integrating the Artesian platform into their workflows, with 65% of new business coming from platform-leveraged transactions.
Artesian Solutions formally launched the Artesian Connect platform aimed at transforming frontline execution and effectiveness. The platform supersedes ARCH, which was built on the same architecture as Connect. The expanded platform now supports advanced sales engagement, customer onboarding, Insurance and credit underwriting, and relationship management.
Connect is Generally Available.
Artesian Connect includes a bespoke rules-processing engine that captures client know-how, including business rules, sales preferences, prospecting criteria, and onboarding checks. Connect supports both Artesian’s Premium Data feeds and customer-licensed third-party data integrations.
By combining first and third-party datasets with business rules and existing policies, the customer engagement process can be streamlined and standardized across large teams. Some of Artesian’s customers have thousands of users, so the ability to improve efficiency without impacting the customer experience is critical to successful implementations.
As rules and policies have been codified, employees do not need to review as much company intelligence. Instead, decision-making is reduced to the core information. Supported processes include sales engagement, onboarding KYC/AML, insurance policy underwriting, and business-specific steps and requirements.
Artesian Connect delivers an improved customer experience, reduced employee onboarding time, and standardized processes and rules across all team members, which is particularly important when engagement priorities and regulations change, as they did in March.
CEO Andrew Yates emphasized that Artesian’s focus is not only on data but on rules and the ability to expedite decision-making based on scores and flagged items. A new feature, engagement signals, go beyond traditional trigger events and look at multiple recent events before offering next best action recommendations.
Connect supports four modes:
Quick Tasks such as pre-screening customers or performing a CBILS (UK SME COVID business loan) check
Tracking Companies and alerting on events, opportunities, credit changes, filings, etc. As alerts are based on company-specific rules and policies, they have greater precision than general notifications.
Multi-linked Analyses that evaluate multiple recent events and determine whether a more in-depth analysis of a prospect or loan is required
Other Application Calls based on customer criteria
Platform apps can be delivered via the desktop, mobile device, or a broker management system, with output such as custom proposals delivered as Word Documents or PDFs.
“Artesian Connect is pioneering a new era in modern data and insight-driven Relationship-Banking – helping commercial teams leverage their extensive know-how and by combining this with the latest advances in data science, we can empower them to do what they do best at a scale and speed never seen before,” explained Yates.
German Sales and Marketing Intelligence firm Echobot is entering the British market with a UK Data Pack for its CONNECT company research and TARGET prospecting services. I covered the CONNECT service yesterday. Today I’ll be delving into the TARGET offering.
Echobot TARGET supports prospect list building for companies and contacts against a broad set of British and firmographic variables, including UK SICs, postal codes, counties, web technologies, and company signals. Radius searching around postal codes lets reps target prospects near their home, office, or a client they plan to visit.
TARGET also provides a set of event signals for prospecting and alerting. German screening supports over 30 event categories, but the UK edition is limited to eight triggers, including M&A, exec changes, and partnerships. The English-language signals are still being built out and will be released as Echobot individually tunes them.
Contact list building supports eighteen departments, five job levels, job title, and field availability (e.g. email, direct dial, XING link, LinkedIn link).
TARGET Lists are displayed as a set of company tiles with a business description, contact information, and the most recent signal. Tiles may be expanded for additional attribute display of web technologies, social links, and firmographics. Users may also link to the CONNECT profile and click through older signals.
TARGET Lists include a segmentation report with an industry pie chart at the two-digit SIC level, company size pyramid, and company heat map. When rolling over the segmentation reports, ALT-text provides additional details about each industry slice or company employment wedge. Users may click on the industry pie chart to drill down into a segment. Clicking on the heat map takes the user to a full-screen view for zooming and recentering.
TARGET lists may be downloaded in four formats (Excel, CSV, JSON, and Salesforce), so records may be analyzed by sales or marketing, uploaded into Salesforce, or delivered to developers. Users may download up to 20,000 records at a time.
TARGET users may also save lists, share lists, or use lists for suppression (exclusion lists). Search criteria may be saved for re-use and alerting when new companies or contacts meet the search criteria.
A single region starts at €499 / month for both TARGET and CONNECT. Licensing both the UK and D-A-CH regions raises the price by €299 / month. Echobot is offering a €100 / month discount to customers that license their solution before the end of the year. A seven-day free trial of CONNECT is available to prospects. TARGET users receive a demo and a single-day, capped-download trial.
Echobot, like many sales and marketing intelligence vendors, has continued to grow during the pandemic. The firm added over twenty staffers this year and posted record revenue this summer.
“The expansion of the market into the English-speaking area is an important step into the future for us. It has never been more important for companies to digitally set up their sales and marketing processes. We are very pleased about the strong growth and the fact that we are able to support our customers beyond our borders.”
Echobot CEO Bastian Karweg
We are beginning to see continental sales and marketing intelligence companies build UK or pan-European services. Along with Echobot, French vendor SparkLane offers a UK service, and Scandinavian vendor Vainu has beta offerings for the UK, France, and the US. Of course, we are also seeing UK firms build European services with Rhetorik, Cognism, and DueDil offering European datasets.
German Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot announced that it is expanding beyond the D-A-CH (Germany / Austria / Switzerland) region and building a European solution. The first step in this expansion is an English-language UI with five million British companies and 23 million decision-makers.
“The market expansion into the English-speaking area is an important step into the future for us. It has never been more important for companies to set up their sales and marketing processes digitally. We are very pleased about the strong growth and the fact that from now on, we can support our customers beyond national borders,” said Echobot Media Technologies CEO Bastian Karweg.
Echobot users can add the “UK Data Pack” to their D-A-CH coverage with the data available for their TARGET (prospecting) and CONNECT (sales intelligence) services. They may also license the UK offering as a standalone service.
Company profiles include firmographics, contact information, registration numbers, web technologies, social media links, current and former directors, executives, company news, Registration and LEI Numbers, and UK SIC or German WZ (NACE variant) industry codes.
An interlinks graph ties together company and director relationships.
Company news and signals are collected from online publications, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Signals (event triggers) may be filtered by signal type or keyword, and news may be filtered by keyword, source, and whether the article is by or about the company.
There is still some tuning around company news tagging, but the product is just being launched. Echobot has a long history of German-language signal monitoring and tagging, so it will likely address this problem fairly swiftly.
Contact data is GDPR compliant, with 68% of contacts having emails and 5% displaying direct dials. “We strictly comply with GDPR, only using dials that have been made public on the web,” said Karweg. “We do not use privacy-infringing tactics like signature block scanning.” Contact data sourcing is provided so that if a rep is asked about the origination of a prospect’s personal data, the sales rep can provide the source. As part of their compliance, the firm has a data privacy officer (a GDPR requirement) and a privacy page that allows individuals to remove themselves from the database.
Echobot provides LinkedIn and XING (a popular LinkedIn rival in the D-A-CH region) contact hyperlinks, but chose not to provide Twitter or Facebook contact links “since those networks usually are used for private networking.” Directors are cross-referenced with LinkedIn and company websites to enrich their profiles further.
Contact news is gathered, though it is usually only available for top execs.
Up to twenty contacts may be viewed or downloaded from the company profile. Contact data includes email, direct dial phone, title, and source (e.g. LinkedIn, XING, Companies House, company website). Information sources are displayed as icons with hyperlinks.
Users may filter the contacts by department and level. They may also search the list by name or title.
Echobot collects most of its information from Companies House and online crawling. They have a third-party vendor relationship for email verification and social media cross-referencing but do not disclose the partner’s name.
Company data are updated daily and consolidated as soon as there have been relevant changes. Contact data are updated every 30 days or so; however, “due to GDPR, we update all contacts at least once every six months,” said Karweg. “If they aren’t publicly available anymore, they will be deleted from our database.”
Financial data is only available for the D-A-CH region, but it is on the 2021 UK roadmap.
The CONNECT sales intelligence service has a responsive design for mobile and tablet display. The TARGET prospecting tool is currently optimized for desktop use, but a mobile-ready version is on the 2021 roadmap.
CONNECT supports browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Explorer. The extensions take the user from a company URL to the CONNECT company profile.
Echobot CONNECT for Salesforce supports I-Frame viewing within Company, Contact, and Lead records. When new records are created, they are matched against the Echobot reference database for enrichment. Stare-and-compare record updates are also supported.
