Sales Engagement vendor Outreach opened its London EMEA headquarters, intending to treble its London customer-facing headcount by the end of the year. The firm already has over 20 local staff in support, sales, professional services, and customer success. The firm has over 500 customers with local or global teams in Europe, including DocuSign, Deliveroo, and Protegrity.
“We see a very real opportunity to help evolve the sales industry and customer experience in Europe, and we see London as the best place to do so. U.S. teams are engaging with customers in new and innovative ways. Our customers in Europe have shared with us that they believe Outreach can provide European customer-facing teams with the tools they need to transform the sector and turn sales into a true engine for business growth.”
Outreach CEO Manny Medina
“I want to
thank our customers here in the U.K. who have been on this journey with us
since we launched, said Outreach CEO, Manny Medina. “Thanks to their
early and ongoing support, we knew we had market fit – we just needed the right
person to grow and lead our team here.”
Tom Castley
was named the head of EMEA sales, where he is “hard at work” assembling the
London sales office. Castley has over twenty years of experience building
“high functioning” technology sales organizations. He previously led
Apptio’s pan-European account team and held several sales roles at Oracle.
“The
sales industry needs to brush up on its image of an industry full of mavericks
who magically secure their sales pipeline at the last minute. We think
it’s time we put this cliché to bed,” said Castley. “This is
why we’re swapping it for a data-driven approach that helps create a steady
flow of prospects filling the pipeline and replaces the ‘peaks and troughs’ of
the sales cycle with a predictable process. Companies can then arm their
team with relevant data to not only perfect the art of customer engagement but
also increase the productivity of the sector and give the board a simple system
to predict their revenue.”
Outreach has over 450 employees and 4000 global customers. Last year, the firm nearly doubled its revenue to $70 million, according to Forbes.
ARCH combines firmographics, compliance flags, and credit insights into a unified company profile.
Artesian Solutions, the UK Sales Intelligence vendor, has been teasing its Artesian Risk and Compliance Hub (ARCH) compliance service for over a year. The new offering, now Generally Available, “enables relationship managers, underwriters and frontline teams within banks, insurance companies, and other financially regulated industries to quickly assess and better understand their corporate clients at the start of the customer journey and throughout the life of the customer.”
Financial services generally perform KYC / AML (Know Your Customer / Anti-Money Laundering) processing during onboarding, but ARCH moves initial processing to frontline staff at the top of the sales funnel before a client is signed. This “distributed compliance,” helps expedite the process, sets client expectations when processing may take longer than normal, and allows relationship managers to avoid prospects that will have arduous compliance processing or which may not meet the institution’s “appetite.”
ARCH
flags risks which may require additional information from the client. By
flagging them at the outset, the RM can request the missing data before it delays
onboarding.
ARCH performs event-driven reviews which begin before onboarding and continue through the life of the loan or policy. Thus, KYC is no longer subject to periodic reviews but is performed dynamically as new information about the client is ingested by ARCH. Instead of client reviews determined by the calendar, events can trigger full client reviews as needed.
ARCH supports commercial insurance policy writing “with a combination of data and sophisticated rules, bringing efficiency, consistency, and accuracy so that underwriters can focus on underwriting. Decisions can be recorded whilst both justified in the future and used for decision analysis and pricing optimisation.” Artesian’s fine-grained taxonomy and assisted machine learning help to identify potential underwriting risks “according to the predetermined definitions of an insurer.”
By
moving compliance reviews to front-line workers, commercial insurers can
perform a KYC check and risk evaluation prior to quoting a policy. “One
reason for using it is that they might want to look at what gets declared to
them by the new customer compared to what they can see from ARCH,” said
Artesian VP of Risk Solutions Matt Elsom. “To do that they can have a
look at some of the fraud-focused data sources and financial data.”
A January
survey by Fenergo of global financial services executives found that poor
onboarding negatively impacts client experience and reduces the lifetime value
(LTV) of clients. 36% acknowledged losing customers due to onboarding
issues and 84% tied the onboarding experience to reduced LTV.
“The Cost of Poor CX,” Fenergo, January 2019. N-=250 global Financial Services executives (Source: Artesian Solutions)
Figure 2: “The Cost of Poor CX,” Fenergo, January 2019. N=250 global Financial Services executives (Source: Artesian Solutions)
Artesian
noted that KYC compliance team workloads have “grown beyond all expectations”
due to the availability of international ownership linkages and ultimate
beneficial ownership data. “The overall effect of this is an MLRO [Money
Laundering Reporting Officer] and board being put under pressure to reduce
onboarding delays whilst maintaining adherence to regulation – and the only
effective solution has been to recruit more compliance analysts. The cost
associated with this approach has become unsustainable as the work queue
continues to grow simply to maintain current levels of new business.”
According
to Artesian, “ARCH is not only an innovative new technology, but a huge leap
forward in the drive for ‘distributed compliance’ – the ability for central
teams to distribute KYC and AML tasks to their frontline colleagues who are
best placed to engage with the client and solve issues in the fastest, most
productive way. It places compliance and powerful risk data at the heart
of the business – front of mind for every member of staff, informing every
decision, instructing every interaction and shaping every relationship from
pre-screening prospective new customers through to ongoing tracking and
long-standing client development.”
The
“configurable decision engine” monitors real-time credit risk and KYC data sets
and applies bank or insurer policies to the compliance decisions. Each
client determines which data sources to ingest and “applies custom policies to
that combined data in the form of multi-dimensional rules” which are screened
and interpreted based upon institutional policies. Flagged issues are
delivered through a browser interface or loaded into other compliance systems
via an API.
“We have the great privilege of serving 80% of the UK’s major banking institutions, providing powerful sales engagement insights to relationship managers. We asked what we could do to make our software even more useful and the answer was ARCH. Almost two years of engineering and millions of pounds later we’re announcing ARCH’s general availability for customers. We believe this puts Artesian in a unique position to be able to combine customer engagement capabilities together with credit and risk in one single application delivered through a browser or mobile device.”
We’ve built a strong team of specialists to extend our core competencies and have worked closely with our key partners at Experian, LexisNexis, and Refinitiv (Thompson Reuters) with more partnerships to come. This allows our customers to select the data sources they already rely upon and trust and easily integrate them into ARCH”
Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates
During
a beta test with a top UK bank, ARCH decisioning was fully consistent with
existing bank processing while flagging 14% more “critical risk” issues than
current bank processes. ARCH also reduced average case time from two
hundred minutes to eight, “allowing relationship managers to know more, know
sooner and save time – enabling them to focus on delivering a better customer
experience.”
PwC
recently added ARCH to its eleven-week incubator program Scale InsureTech which
is “aimed at identifying and developing fast-growth technology companies in the
insurance sector.”
Artesian
financial services clients include RBS, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, EY, and
Marsh.
North American sales intelligence firms do not normally support client onboarding and risk assessment, but UK and European firms support these functions due to a richer set of registry data. European vendors such as DueDil, Bureau van Dijk, and Artesian support sales, marketing, and regulatory compliance.
French Sales and Marketing Intelligence vendor Sparklane released its Predictive Account Scoring Solution for B2B sales. Sparklane Predict now supports dynamic account scoring based upon Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP), sales feedback, and CRM win/loss data. The service is currently available in the UK and France with additional European markets in development.
According to the firm, Predict
supports a “human-in-the-loop” lead review process which “feeds lead decisions
back into the ICP model, providing additional intelligence towards distinguishing between good
and bad prospects.” Predict also collects CRM intelligence on opportunity
outcomes, providing an additional basis for model refinement.
Predict
supports bi-directional syncing with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo,
and Eloqua. Sparklane uploads suggested accounts and leads to CRMs and
gathers historical outcomes for ICP modeling and dynamic scoring.
Sales Reps are shown list segmentation while reviewing individual leads. Along with business descriptions and firmographics, reps see fit and need scores. When reps flag a lead as interesting or not interesting, the decision is fed back into the ICP model.
Sparklane
claims that it shortens sales cycles by 28%, increases contract volume by 25%,
and improves the business conversion rate by 70%.
Sparklane Predict leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as machine learning and natural language processing to dramatically improve sales productivity and customer insights. Sales rep attention is directed towards accounts and leads most likely to close based on both fit (company attributes) and need (sales triggers such as international expansion, employee growth, or product launches). Furthermore, automated data enrichment ensures that reps are working with accurate, complete, and current data.
Sparklane Press Release
When building Sparklane models, both win and loss scenarios are employed, providing a more robust model than current customer lists. Along with win/loss scenarios, Sparklane supports other binary outcome scenarios:
Account Renew vs. Account Drop
Account Upgrade vs. Account Downgrade
High Margin Profitable Accounts vs. Low Margin Unprofitable Accounts
Sparklane
also supports multi-product line upsell and cross-sell models.
“Unfortunately,
many of the vendors now marketing ideal customer profile solutions (ICP) are
offering little more than basic prospecting or look-a-like lists under the ICP
banner,” said Sparklane CEO Frédéric Pichard. “A true ICP service begins
with both positive and negative accounts so the platform can distinguish
between accounts that closed and those that failed to close. A true model
also contains feedback loops from sales reps and the CRM. It is the
addition of feedback that refines the model over time, improving the predictive
precision of account scores.”
Sparklane supports nearly 250 customers out of offices in Paris, Nantes, and London. Last year, Sparklane grew its recurring revenue by 60%.
UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions recognized significant growth in the technology sector in 2018, with tech sector revenue up 255% in 2018. Artesian attributed the growth to the “vast return on investment that can be achieved by leveraging millions of data points to create new relationships, establish credibility, address individual pain points and wider market challenges, and create new opportunities.”
The Artesian
social selling platform provides users with a rich set of sales triggers
combined with company intelligence.
“Technology
companies are increasingly investing much of their valuable brain power into
crafting long-term, powerful relationships from the start of the customer
journey,” said CEO Andrew Yates. “By harnessing technologies such as
Artesian they’re uncovering opportunities to act in more contextually aware,
empathetic and personalised ways and in turn are seizing opportunities to
differentiate in an entirely different way, rather than focusing on features,
benefits and brand reputation alone.”
Yates continued
describing Artesian’s value proposition to technology sales reps:
“Harnessing the most valuable company information, market data and customer insights means Artesian’s technology customers can build innovative propositions for their products and services, prioritising ideas based on solving actual business challenges in each customer segment they serve. The sheer pace of change in the technology sector, including new entrant disruption, means enterprise providers can quickly fall behind if they’re not able establish deep, value-based relationships, especially when they may not be able to react as quickly within product development as their smaller competitors. Artesian’s growth in the sector highlights a shift in focus towards customer experience and value-based selling. Our technology customers are great examples of how to stay relevant and grow, even in a challenging political and economic environment.”
Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates
Artesian’s technology customers include Oracle, Amazon Web Services, SAP, BT, Infinity Tracking, and Canon.
Artesian Solutions has also shown strength selling to British banks and insurance companies. Another 2019 object is the infusion of artificial intelligence into financial services onboarding and compliance tools. The firm has 30,000 users located in the United Kingdom and United States.
Artesian will be launching its Risk and Compliance Hub, which supports front-line KYC checks, in 2019.
Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates published a year-in-review blog and a preview of their upcoming Artesian Risk and Compliance Hub (ARCH). The new ARCH capabilities will extend their social selling platform into Know Your Client (KYC) reviews at UK banks. ARCH is in early testing.
ARCH leverages Artesian capabilities around interpreting structured and unstructured data ”to create useful flags and to drive appropriate actions.” Artesian already is on the desktop of relationship managers (RMs) at most of the major UK banks. “This puts us in a unique position to make insights regarding financial and KYC risks available to the front-line as a pre-screen, to ensure that corporate banking relationships begin with an appropriate understanding of risk.”
Arch
supports an automated audit trail and storage of evidence. Early tests
found ARCH to be “100% accurate in reflecting policy in pre-screening.” Arch
also reduced the time spent in gathering risk assessment data by 90% and
identified 14% more risk issues compared with manual processing.
By providing
a pre-screen at the front-end of client discussions, RMs can focus on new
clients that will pass muster during the onboarding review process. This
process makes both relationship managers and compliance professionals more
effective. RMs will no longer be spending time with prospective clients
that won’t pass compliance review while compliance professionals can focus
their attention on more complex reviews which require their skill and
expertise.
“ARCH gives companies control of a sophisticated decision engine to enable data being accessed to have rules applied and flags created. It means that Relationship Managers can see a summarised view of what their central risk teams assessment of a potential client would be, before spending time and money engaging with them. The automation aspect of this is fundamental as it brings efficiency, consistency and control to the areas it transforms.
But more than that, it places compliance at the heart of the business – front of mind for every member of staff, informing every decision, instructing every interaction and shaping every relationship from pre-screens for new customer prospecting through to long-standing client development.”
Artesian CEO Andrew Yates
Yates cited
McKinsey research which notes that the risk function at financial institutions
is being transformed “with the detection, assessment, and mitigation of risk” being
transferred to all employees by 2025.
Risk and Compliance tools are a greater focus amongst European sales intelligence firms due to the availability of private company registry data. While US private companies provide only minimalist filings with Secretaries of State offices (with a few exceptions in insurance, banking, and nonprofits), UK company registration data includes directors, shareholders, and financials. Other UK compliance data includes sanctions lists, Politically Exposed Persons (global government officials and relatives), disqualified directors, gazettes (shuttered business and those in receivership), and traditional credit reports. Vendors such as Artesian, DueDil, and Bureau van Dijk have recently emphasized compliance and risk tool development over sales intelligence offerings.
Artesian
reached 30,000 users in 2018 with their user base tracking over 800,000
companies. According to Yates, Artesian customers “have received 12.5
million actionable insights, 2.5m unique computational matches each week,
automated the equivalent of 2 trillion Google searches per week (13bn per
hour), and have made 523,813 useful connections using Artesian data.”
Artesian
staff provided over 350 training sessions, webinars, and workshops to more than
3,000 users in 2018. Artesian Academy delivered an additional 1,200
multi-media tutorials, certification modules, role-based tips, and social media
best practices overviews.
UK Technology Sales Intelligence vendor Rhetorik released an enhanced version of its UK and Irish NetFinder service. The revised edition covers over 40,000 corporate and public-sector sites. The service doubled its technology buyers to 215,000 and increased its technology coverage five-fold including enhanced install data on cloud, enterprise and vertical industry applications, system software and middleware applications.
The Rhetorik database tags over 10,000 products from 6,000 vendors and maintains over 150 technology categories. Data coverage spans 164 biographic, firmographic, and technographic variables including email, phone, revenue, employees, line of business, and site-level technographics. All contacts are GDPR compliant and 92% contain emails.
“Rhetorik has adapted its policies and procedures to upgrade DPA regulatory standards to meet GDPR requirements,” said the firm. “While monitoring closely progress on the e-Privacy legislation, Rhetorik follows best-practice processes as set by PECR – Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulation. We have implemented clear and easy to follow procedures for individuals to be informed and manage their own Business Card Data. We keep access to all B2B information secure and protected.”
Data is gathered through a combination of automated means and editorial research.
Over the past year, Rhetorik has partnered with the European Market Intelligence Group (EMIG) and CNCData to provide European and AsiaPac coverage. The EMIG coverage spans 14 countries, 180,000 companies, and one million contacts. The CNCData partnership delivers over two million contacts and 1.2 million companies across 23 AsiaPac countries.
Rhetorik, which has provided technology intelligence for over two decades, underwent a management buy-out last summer. At the time, CEO Meredith Amdur, set a goal of expanding their “data gathering and analytics capabilities to create new products for technology sales and marketing professionals worldwide.”
I am proud to announce that I released the second edition of my book, 2017 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors yesterday. It has been a long process of updating and expanding the original eleven profiles, adding three new profiles for the UK (Bureau van Dijk, Artesian Solutions, and DueDil), and adding four profiles for Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) vendors with ecosystems (KiteDesk, Outreach, Quota Factory, SalesLoft).
I have written blog articles on almost all of the seventeen profiled vendors in the past year. So if you’ve found my blog useful, the book will be invaluable for procurement decisions or staying abreast of the key vendors in the SI space.
As sales teams and procurement departments may have gone through vendor demos or trials back in 2015 or early 2016, I have added sections which detail product changes over the past year. These include new product launches, vendor changes, enhancements, and pricing changes.
I have also added or expanded discussions on Account Based Marketing (ABM), Account Based Sales Development (ABSD), Marketing Automation connectors, and the UK market.
You will even find a new Glossary.
Feel free to contact me at 978-692-0170 or MLevy@GZConsulting.org. I am offering a 20% licensing discount during the month of January.
I am now taking pre-orders for my 2017 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors. This is the second edition of my book which I expect to deliver to my clients by the end of this year.
I am currently bundling in the 2015 edition with pre-orders at no extra charge. Please contact me at MLevy@GZConsulting.org if you would like to discuss a license.
Approaching the update has proven to be as big a task as writing the original edition due to the rapid expansion of the sales intelligence market and a decision to include several additional categories of vendors.
To assist purchasing departments that either purchased my book last year or performed a 2015 or 2016 evaluation, I have added profile sections covering:
2016 New Products
2016 Vendor Changes
2016 Functionality Changes
2016 Pricing Changes
ABM Features
ABSD Partners
The original edition focused on eleven vendors that provided either US or global markets. Coverage included the top five by revenue: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Data.com, Hoover’s, Avention, and DiscoverOrg.
This year I have added profiles on three UK-based vendors:
Bureau van Dijk is one of the top global financial research and sales intelligence companies. I omitted them last year because they did not return my calls (yes, analysts may ignore you if you fail to support their research efforts). This year I will cover them whether they cooperate or not.
UK vendors, along with Avention, provide a deep set of registered company data including Directors & Shareholders; Mortgages & Charges; Gazette Status (winding down, receivership notices); and filings data. Thus, if you have a significant percentage of your sales reps in the UK (or Europe in general), it is worth understanding how US and UK sales intelligence products differ in content, functionality, strengths, and weaknesses.
A second new category of entrants is the PC/VC databases that rolled out sales intelligence services over the past year:
These products cover a smaller universe of companies (generally around one million), but focus on the fastest growing companies. Traditional sales intelligence vendors tend to be behind the curve on profiling these firms. Furthermore, they include funding and M&A intelligence, also gaps within the traditional sales intelligence space.
The third new category is Account Based Sales Development (ABSD) vendors (aka Sales Acceleration) that focus on workflow tools for Sales Development Reps (SDRs). These products provide email templates, phone dialers, cadence/workflow tools, and analytics. While not technically sales intelligence vendors, I am covering four vendors that have built partner ecosystems that include SI vendors:
Finally, I added discussions of both ABM and ABSD as both topics have trended strongly over the past year as B2B firms look to adopt a more strategic approach to sales and marketing. Several firms are now positioning themselves as ABM solutions or strongly messaging around their ABM capabilities.
UK private company financials (source: Artesian Solutions)
The UK is the second largest market for sales intelligence services. For US firms, the UK is usually either the second or third market (after Canada) which they support. Thus, the UK market is served by both British (e.g. DueDil, Artesian Solutions, Bureau van Dijk) and American companies (e.g. Avention, Dun & Bradstreet, Factiva).
A key difference between the US and UK markets is the availability of UK private company data. Approximately three million active UK firms are required to register with Companies House (the major exceptions are small businesses, partnerships, and public sector entities). Large firms are required to provide full financials while mid-size firms may only be required to file a Balance Sheet or summary financials. The smallest firms may simply be required to file a basic Annual Return with Director and Shareholder information and abbreviated accounts.
Along with annual financials, the UK filing regime requires statements concerning Directors and Shareholders (DASH); Mortgages, Charges, and County Court Judgments (MCCJ); and Gazette filings concerning receiverships and the winding down of businesses. The net effect is a richer set of financial figures, superior intelligence concerning corporate families and ownership, a broad list directors, and intelligence concerning cross-company director linkages.
There are some drawbacks to this system. First, the filings for private companies are not filed until three quarters after the end of the financial year so one is generally looking at data that is three to seven quarters in arrears. A company’s financial position can shift significantly during this time. Of course, few companies in the US are required to make any kind of financial filings.
Second, statements may be filed from the offices of corporate secretaries, accountants, or corporate owners. Thus, the registered address often differs from the actual “trading address”. When evaluating UK sales intelligence tools, look for vendors that provide both registered and trading addresses. You should also ask about the population of URLs and phone numbers.
In the UK, sales reps should be calling into the Trading Address (physical) location, not the Registered Address (legal). Make sure your Sales Intelligence service provides both. (Source: Avention)
Third, while there is very good data concerning corporate linkages, including minority shareholdings, the data only goes to the subsidiary level. But companies may have hundreds of operating locations not listed. In the US, vendors capture all of these branch locations, but this intelligence is more limited in the UK.
Another problem with this regime is there is little focus on who is managing the organization. While a few directors are listed, they may not be the people the sales rep will be calling into. Thus, the sales intelligence vendors have been working to tie in marketing datasets which provide additional color (British translation: colour) including mid-level managers with emails, URLs, and phone numbers.
Finally, one is more likely to have turnover figures (US translation: revenue) in the UK than in the US. Conversely, US vendors are more likely to have employee figures and modeled revenue figures. As a result, the employee count is a better sizing metric when prospecting in the US and turnover is the superior prospecting metric in the UK.
I am currently working on the next edition of my Field Guide for Sales Intelligence Vendors. One of the key additions to this year’s edition is the inclusion of three UK vendors: Artesian Solutions, Bureau van Dijk, and DueDil. Avention, which also offers a strong UK product, was previously included. The new edition will be available before the end of this year. I am now taking pre-orders for the expanded guide with purchasers receiving the 2015 edition at no charge.
