Scandinavian Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu released a new platform for its Swedish and Finnish databases. The new platform includes expanded datasets, CRM connectors, usage-based pricing, and an updated UX.
Customers can migrate to the new platform or stay on the old one near-term. However, future development will only be made for the new one.
The new platform offers a “simplified and unified” UX to “better represent what we offer clients: Actionable and reliable business data,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang. Changes include a simplified prospecting module for Norway and Sweden and updated profile displays.
The platform includes a new filter architecture that will allow Vainu to “develop new filters in the UI faster as our databases expand with new data sets without compromising the platform’s speed or usability.”
Users can now define custom table layouts for reports which are reflected in the product and when downloading tables. Users control which fields to display and their order. In addition, Vainu added a JSON download format.
Vainu’s updated Build a List UX.
As the new platform pricing is usage-based, it includes a usage dashboard that tracks records downloaded and CRM account records matched.
While the old platform supported 400 financial variables, they were “incoherent and unmaintained fields, with duplicates, poor documentation, and poor naming.” The new standardized financials display “100 carefully picked financial terms,” and financials are segmented for improved display and navigation.
Along with field display, the reports include definitions, making it easier to understand KPIs and how fields are calculated and rolled up.
To help with customer outreach, Vainu added 26,000 GDPR-compliant, human-verified contacts for Finland and Sweden. Contact records include title, phone number, email, and LinkedIn handle. Contacts were collected for firms with at least 10M€ (Finland) or 100MSEK (Sweden) in turnover.
Scandinavian Business ID connectors are available for Salesforce, MSD 365, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. Global Domain-based connectors support Salesforce and HubSpot.
Bang noted that some customers and prospects had found Vainu to be a “significant financial commitment.” The new usage-based pricing model “helps alleviate this worry” as it “lowers the barrier to entry for trying out data.”
SMB Pricing for one of the Nordic country databases begins at 4,200€ per annum with a 750€ onboarding fee. The Team level supports one user and includes data updates and workflow triggers for 1,000 accounts. The Business edition is similar but supports 8,000 updated accounts with triggers for 9,900€.
The Global Business database, which is domain-based, supports up to 10,000 company exports or enrichments and provides full access to the global database. The Global Database is priced at 12,000€, with each band of 10,000 additional enrichments priced at 1,000€.
Vainu has shifted to a usage-based pricing model that monitors the number of downloaded and enriched records.
Yesterday, I posted about Vainu’s new Global Database. The firm also announced its Vainu for HubSpot connector for matching and enriching company data against its global reference database.
“Most sales and marketing teams want to be data-driven. They want to run ABM campaigns, apply modern lead scoring models, and automate many parts of the sales process. SalesOps and Marketing Ops professionals are there to facilitate all that, but there’s one common challenge they’re facing: CRM data is messy and outdated,” observed Vainu co-founder Mikko Honkanen. “With that struggle in mind, we thought it would be a good time to launch a new HubSpot connector at the same time that we’re launching Vainu Global…so that it’s easy for companies using HubSpot to get their CRM data cleaned, updated, and enriched.”
As companies are being matched against Vainu’s new global database, not registered Nordic filings, the match field is URLs, not business IDs or VATs. With forms, contacts are matched against email domains. If a company is not already in HubSpot, new Accounts are created, and the Contacts are associated with the new record.
“This means it works very well with HubSpot CRM, because domain is often the company property that a business will have for almost all of the company records they have in their CRM, which means that it’ll be easier to match the companies in HubSpot to our database,” contended Honkanen.
During beta testing, match rates were as high as 99%. For non-matched records, the firm offers on-demand matching against missing domains. If they are valid domains, Vainu adds profiles to its company directory.
Along with standard firmographics, account enrichment includes Vainu’s Custom Industry segments, global web traffic ranking, and Vainu segments (e.g., website keywords or phrases). Profiles generally have four to eight industry labels, helping with targeting.
Other fields include technographics and domain redirect information. Redirects are often implemented after acquisitions or rebrands and are useful for assigning contacts.
Vainu for HubSpot Send to CRM
Vainu offers a field mapper for assigning Vainu data to HubSpot and setting update rules. For example, admins can set field update logic to always update, update if null, or never update. Vainu custom fields that are not in HubSpot are automatically created. Along with companies, admins can map contacts, tasks, notes, and deals.
Thus, admins can build a campaign and upload it to HubSpot with task assignments. The inclusion of tasks and notes helps specify campaign details, such as recommended collateral and case studies, with the Vainu Custom Industry and Technology Intelligence assisting with messaging.
If companies do not exist in HubSpot, Account records are created. If they exist, then the existing records are enriched.
By default, HubSpot does not overwrite current account owners.
Updates can be performed on a scheduled basis or executed as a one-time batch operation.
Vainu intelligence with tasks and notes displayed in HubSpot.
European Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu unveiled its new Global Database this week, a domain-based company dataset spanning over 65 million companies. The database was built through web-crawling and includes standard firmographics, technographics, Vainu Custom Industry Codes, social links (Facebook and LinkedIn), and web-based insights (keywords and phrases that describe the company).
Domains are mapped to headquarters locations, with additional locations captured during the site crawl and displayed as part of the profile. A countries of operation field helps with market entry planning (e.g., which companies in our ICP have operations in specific countries?). Vainu also captures website languages, helping determine which markets companies are targeting.
“If you’re selling a product or service where the buying decision is made on a business unit/regional level, having this type of data in your CRM is crucial,” argued co-founder Mikko Honkanen. “It helps your sales reps to pick upsell and cross-sell opportunities and in general, makes it easier to maximize the revenue potential of your customer portfolio.”
“Unfortunately, finding good data for regional offices has been challenging in the past,” continued Honkanen. “Most companies will only list their main office on their social media accounts, and it’s been difficult for salespeople to manually add office data from company websites to their business systems due to the limitations in the availability of data properties.”
Filtering with Vainu’s proprietary industry codes and associated Confidence Scores.
Vainu offers over 900 proprietary industry codes, including emerging industries such as SaaS and Artificial Intelligence not available in other taxonomies. When screening, the system defaults to high-level confidence, but users can more broadly search by accepting companies with lower industry tagging confidence. In addition, users may select one or multiple categories, employ Boolean logic (e.g., SaaS AND Executive Recruitment), and modify their selects with web-based insights.
The crawler and platform UX are English only.
Discrete sizing data is not provided, with companies mapped to five employee ranges. Vainu employs an “ordinal regression and classification approach” to its model that factors in web traffic, the number of office locations, detected web technologies, mentions of specific key phrases, etc.
Honkanen argues that its methodology may be off by one size band but is unlikely to make large errors. “Our own internal testing indicates that our model generally outperforms other employee count models, but it truly shines when it comes to minimizing the large, important mistakes. What that means is that it might be difficult for the model to choose between 51-200 and 201-1,000 if the company has roughly 200 employees, but it has an easy time avoiding big and important mistakes, such as enterprise companies being classified as micro companies. In other words, our model still makes mistakes, but those mistakes are often small in magnitude, i.e., the model might predict the nearest neighbor.”
Vainu has been building and tuning the database for over a year, helping it distinguish between product sites (e.g., Tide) and company sites (e.g., Proctor & Gamble). It is growing at 100,000 companies per day and recrawls sites every sixty days. Users can set up saved searches that identify new companies, upload them to HubSpot, and alert the sales rep.
Company data is available through a web-based platform, API, CSV downloads, and connectors (HubSpot today, with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the Global Database roadmap).
Users can also upload lists of domains for matching and enrichment. When downloading data, they specify file formats, controlling which fields to download and their order.
As they offer a LinkedIn field, users can quickly create and upload LinkedIn Matched Audiences to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager with high match rates.
The database does not contain contacts, but Honkanen argues that Vainu’s company data is superior to firmographics from other services.
Honkanen provided several reasons for not offering contacts, “We don’t want to be a vendor that provides bulk contact data…We don’t want to promote salespeople to do spam. Also, it is very challenging to do that in a GDPR-compliant way.”
Instead, the company wants to promote “smart, Account Based Marketing” that supports very specific industry and keyword screening and LinkedIn audience campaigns. From the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, users can target by persona. Users can also match against existing HubSpot contacts with pre-existing consent tied to Vainu-enriched firmographics.
“If you’re looking for a combination of high-quality firmographic and website-based insights, we’ve got you covered,” blogged Vainu Marketer Nikolai Bang. “Our global data offering includes numerous important data points, such as location, industry, company size, technologies, website keywords, and website traffic, that, according to our customers who have tested several offerings, other vendors cannot provide at a similar quality.”
While other databases, including Vainu’s Nordics database, are built around business ids, the global database is built around domains, with the firm capturing multiple locations related to domains. Business ids are preferred for KYC and credit scenarios as the data is tied to legal ids, but domain data matches well against CRMs and emails.
Vainu contends that domain-keyed databases are better for ICP/TAM analysis as subsidiaries and branches aren’t double counted, providing a more accurate view of market opportunity. Vainu claims that ICPs built using Vainu Custom Industry codes and website-based insights during beta testing consistently achieved 90% accuracy.
The Global Database resides on a new platform and is available as a distinct product with separate licensing and administration from its Nordic registered-data services.
Pricing starts at €12,000 per annum, with a one-time setup fee starting at €1,000. Instead of seat-based pricing, Vainu is pricing based on the number of records uploaded or maintained.
European Sales and Marketing Intelligence vendor Vainu released Workflow Triggers for target account monitoring. Workflows leverage recent enhancements to the company’s firmographics, user interface, and CRM integrations.
Workflows are available for Salesforce, Dynamics 365 Online, HubSpot, and PipeDrive and support Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, and Task records.
Workflows setup requires four steps:
Select the target group for tracking
Define the filter options such as signal events (e.g., funding, new hires, M&A), data changes (e.g., revenue, employees, address), or new companies in the target group. Over 70 triggers events are available. Data changes may be triggered by any licensed data field.
Choose the destination (CRM, Slack, email, or webhook).
Set context including the number and frequency of triggers, additional information, and notes. “For example, if you’re monitoring accounts to launch account-based marketing campaigns, you can update a data field in your CRM object with custom text saying ‘ABM campaign Q3/2021’,” wrote Head of Marketing Aamer Hasu.
Sales Operations can map data fields with custom text, providing context to data updates and workflows.
Workflow Triggers identify “any significant changes in real-time and use them to trigger workflows across your business systems,” said Hasu. “They’re perfect for nudging prospects over the line and discovering sales opportunities you never knew existed.”
Vainu data covers Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, France (beta), and the United Kingdom (beta). Users may license one or multiple countries.
One gap in the offering is the lack of support for Sales Engagement Platforms (SEP) such as SalesLoft and Outreach. SEP functionality is a logical extension to Workflow Triggers. While SEPs are less established in Europe than in North America, both companies have opened EMEA sales and support offices in London.
Vainu is offering fourteen-day free trials to the service. Email as a trigger destination is available for all users, but CRM integrations are sold separately.
European Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu implemented a proprietary AI-based industry taxonomy. The 700+ segments are derived from company website content and “extensive training data sets to determine unique industries for each company.” Custom industry labels may be combined when list building. Thus, sales and marketing can target companies, such as “Nordic SaaS providers building marketing automation platforms” or “Medical device manufactures developing machine learning applications.”
The industry codes are clustered into 46 custom industry groups. For example, there are over 80 software codes and 19 sustainability codes (e.g., Biofuel, Biomass Energy, Clean Energy). Vainu has focused the initial set of codes around emerging technologies and fast-changing markets. Traditional industries such as agriculture, food and beverage, and manufacturing are supported by broad codes as these industries are well defined by traditional industry taxonomies.
Custom Industry codes may be combined to build lists such as Medical Devices that employ Machine Learning.
“Traditional industry classifications for B2B segmentation don’t do the trick anymore—they are too generic, broad, or even incorrect,” blogged Vainu Customer Marketer Ella Tyrväinen.
Custom Industries are available on the Vainu platform and via its API. Industry-based target lists may be exported as a CSV file or JSON.
Vainu also recently added three fields to its list exports: Countries of Operation, Website Languages, and Technographics. In February, Vainu released a webCRM integration.
Sales Intelligence vendor Vainu has added a set of Workflow Triggers that take automated actions based upon CRM data updates. As Vainu enriches CRMs with financial data mined from European registered data filings, it has raw, current data for triggering activities. Admins set up the trigger rules, and Vainu creates “smart actions” such as creating CRM Tasks, adding a row in Google Sheets, or sending a Slack notice.
For example, a Workflow Trigger may be set up to look for SaaS companies that meet the “Rule of 40” condition (revenue growth plus profitability margin).
Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen notes that trigger rules and ratios will vary by industry and may include custom rules specific to each of Vainu’s customers. Thus, the Rule of 40 “is typical of the software industry but isn’t that critical for other businesses. For being truly data-driven, each company has its own magic numbers based on the data points of their interest.”
Vainu claims that it supports thousands of data points for triggered workflows, kicking off both sales notifications and custom marketing messages associated with each trigger.
“Some people might want to know when a company starts using lead capture forms on its website. Someone else might want to be alerted as soon as a company adds a new environmental standard to their corporate social responsibility web page. Or when a company appoints a new CEO. Or when it adds an auxiliary name that includes the word ‘restaurant’ in it. The most valuable trigger event is often a change in that specific event.”
Vainu CEO Mikko Honkanen
Along with data changes, actions may be based upon any of seventy event triggers or new accounts meeting ICP criteria.
Vainu, headquartered in Helsinki, emphasizes the value of dynamic data fed into enterprise platforms. Dynamic data ensures that decision-making is based upon timely and accurate data. It also allows salespeople to be customer-centric.
“By having access to data that informs them of the current situation of an organization, as well as what recent changes the organization has undergone, salespeople are able to tailor their messaging and offer a personalized experience,” blogged Vainu marketer Nikolai Bang. Vainu covers nearly thirty million companies across Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom. Triggers are based upon the licensed countries.
Finnish sales intelligence vendor Vainu announced the immediate availability of their new Vainu for CRM connectors. The new service supports data viewing, synchronization, prospecting, and triggered alerting in Salesforce, MS Dynamics 365, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. Additional CRM integrations are planned.
Vainu launched its original prospecting service in 2014 but is looking to make its data more consumable by embedding it into user workflows. According to Vainu Head of Marketing Mikko Luhtava, Vainu’s retention rate is much higher when there is a clear user workflow. Thus, the goal was to make the sales rep’s experience as “frictionless as possible.”
“Since we founded Vainu, we’ve known that in addition to the who, when, what, and why of sales, the other challenge is to get people to actually use that information. We realized that the key to success there is removing friction; making data as easy as possible to consume. With Vainu for CRM, we’ve done exactly that—embedded into everything you do in the CRM, real-time company data will be hard to avoid.”
CEO Mikko Honkanen
The sync
initially updates account and opportunity records, but additional record types
will be supported in the future. Custom field mapping and update /
overlay rules are also planned.
Data syncing
is asynchronous and bi-directional. “Any time you add a record to the
CRM, it will search Vainu to fill in data, and any time Vainu receives an
update on a company, it will push the update to CRMs with that entity in the
database in a matter of minutes,” said Luhtava.
Multi-variable
fuzzy matching logic is employed with match confidence scores. Vainu also
supports auto-match functionality for new records and Send to CRM from the
Vainu browser service. Additional features include duplicate record
checking and “stare and compare” updates by sales reps.
“Syncing up
with a CRM requires an excellent matching tool, and ours is world-class,” said
CTO Tuomas Rasila. “Instead of merely matching based on global unique
identifiers, it compares the full extent of a company record to our database to
increase our confidence rating in the match. Once connected, our platform
learns from everything salespeople are doing in the CRM to deliver information
that’s as relevant as possible. And since everything is automated, the
data-driven experience won’t require endless effort on our customers’ end.”
Vainu for CRM includes two advanced features: CRM-Vainu joint-variable prospecting and triggered workflows. Joint-variable prospecting allows sales or marketing to build lists using both CRM and Vainu variables. For example, a targeted prospecting list can be built for a territory which excludes current accounts or for which there was no recent activity. Over 100 joint selects are available. The only other vendor that provides such a feature is D&B Hoovers.
Workflows can be triggered by any of Vainu’s event triggers, which are derived from news, filings, and data changes. Vainu supports 55 triggers which can be combined with keywords. Both general company-level events (e.g. mergers, acquisitions, expansions, funding) and “very detailed, database-specific” triggers such as new vehicles, new website registrations, and new technology deployments are available.
“With the trigger-based approach, the likelihood of bringing in a new customer is more than two-times higher if there is an event within a prospect that triggers you to reach out to them.”
Vainu
Triggered
events are displayed within the CRM and Slack. They can also be sent as
email alerts and through Zapier connectors. Workflows are currently
available for Nordic companies and the Netherlands.
Vainu
includes connectors as part of their standard subscription. Pricing
begins at €6,600 per year for one country and five seats.
Helsinki-based
Vainu has grown revenue to €15 million in five years. The firm supports
over 2,000 customers, including EY, Santander, Bridgestone, SAP, and Telia.
The Vainu
database covers Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands with
registry data matched against web mined intelligence and 55 business signals.
France, Britain, and the United States are currently in beta.
US data is
gathered from state Attorneys General filings supplemented with crawled
intelligence. At the moment, the US database is mostly being sold for
data projects.
Vainu sells databases by country with both local language and English user interfaces.
Finnish sales intelligence vendor Vainu rebranded earlier this week. The goal was to provide a unified view of the company. Vainu is focused on company intelligence but includes registered contact/director details and mined data. The firm also offers CRM and MAP data enrichment and hygiene services.
Unlike most
sales intelligence databases, Vainu is available in English, Swedish,
Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, Danish and French. Country datasets include
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and The Netherlands with detailed financial
data available for Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Beta datasets are
available for France, the UK, and the US with additional countries being
developed.
Core UK data
is gathered from Companies House. US data is aggregated from state
filings.
I’ve been planning on covering Vainu for the past six months but was waiting for an event. Rebranding is as good a reason any.
Vainu was
launched in 2014 and crowdsourced its initial dog nose logo (Vainu is a Finnish
word for the scent picked up by an animal). The website design and other
branding aspects were inconsistent.
“Everything else was pretty much put together ad hoc after that: color schemes and supporting visuals for our first website layout, stock photos for our first slide decks, different messages to cater to the situations at hand. The end result has been just as fragmented or ad hoc as our strategy: we’ve looked and felt different and sounded different in any situation.”
Mikko Luhtava, Vainu Head of Communications
Now that the
firm has 2,000 customers and 180 employees, they felt it was time to formalize
their brand with a new logo, tagline, and website with real images and black,
white, and yellow text.
Vainu argues
that B2B Sales is still stuck in the era of spam emails and cold calling lists.
“While buyers are looking for a real conversation, one where they’re
engaged and understood, salespeople are looking at activity targets and sales
quota, merely treating buyers as numbers,” blogged Luhtava.
Thus, the
firm offers “real-time B2B sales.” It is akin to SalesLoft’s call for
authenticity in sales. “While buyers are looking for a real conversation,
one where they’re engaged and understood, salespeople are looking at activity
targets and sales quota, merely treating buyers as numbers,” stated Luhtava. “At
Vainu, we believe there’s a right way of doing B2B sales—a way that is
personalized, a way that uses data, a way that focuses on the buyer. And
we’ve made it our mission to make salespeople better at their jobs, by bringing
real-time company data to every customer interaction. We call this
real-time sales.”
Vainu
supports company list building. Selects include firmographics,
technographics, buying signals (sales triggers), and account intelligence from
the company’s CRM. Trigger alerts cover company announcements, personnel
changes, technology updates, and new additions to a prospect list.
The Vainu
database covers nearly 60 million active companies and includes company
profiles, technology stacks, corporate financials, and recent company news.
CRM admins
can setup data syncing and enrichment with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot,
Pipedrive, Upsales, and SuperOffice. Zapier is available for other
platforms. The firm also supports an API.
Vainu
enriches leads before they are loaded into MAPs assisting with lead scoring and
routing.
Vainu also
offers bulk data for data modeling including business registry data, website
information, and open and web-crawled intelligence. Applications include
churn prediction, account scoring, and financial services risk calculations.
Pricing
begins at €6,600 (£6,000 or $7,250) per year for five
reps plus a one-time onboarding fee of €600 for a single country database. Each
additional country dataset is priced at €3,000. At 25 seats, the service
is priced at €30,600 (£28,000 or $33,650) with a one-time
onboarding fee of €2,100. Each additional country dataset is priced at
€3,000. Nordic financial data adds €2,400.
