Salesforce announced a pair of autonomous Einstein Sales Agents: Einstein SDR and Einstein Sales Coach. The products, built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform, will be generally available in October.
Einstein SDR Agent, a chatbot, engages with inbound prospects and is not limited to pre-programmed responses. The multi-lingual conversational marketing agent manages top-of-funnel communications and hands leads off to sellers. The SDR Agent employs RAG to interpret and process information. It can answer questions, handle objections, qualify leads, and book meetings, with responses grounded by Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Data Cloud.
“Companies can upload existing sales materials like product FAQs, sales plays, and case studies for Einstein to use to generate a trusted and accurate response to lead queries,” explained the firm.”
Configuring Einstein SDR Agents.
Revenue Operations can customize the language, avatar, and tone. They can also set “guardrails for how often, what channels, and when Einstein should engage with inbound prospects.”
Einstein SDR Agent also lets RevOps set lead routing rules, log actions as Tasks, and monitor activity via existing reports and dashboards.
“Einstein SDR Agent makes decisions and prioritizes actions that align with the desired outcomes and analyzes a prospect’s question to autonomously determine what to do next — whether that’s answering product questions, handling objections, or scheduling a meeting,” stated Salesforce. “Each response is trusted, accurate, and personalized because it is grounded in a company’s CRM and harmonized external data using Agentforce’s retrieval augmented generation (RAG) service.”
When meetings are set, Einstein SDR Agent warmly hands off to reps with a pre-meeting summary that “critical lead information and previous interactions.”
The SDR Agent supports SMS and WhatsApp.
Einstein Sales Coach offers embedded role plays with feedback based on current scenarios.
The Einstein Sales Coach also employs RAG and text-to-voice to assist with sales role plays. Each roleplay is deal-specific, and Einstein provides post-roleplay feedback. RAG allows Einstein to customize sale scenarios based on Salesforce details about the deal, account, and prior correspondence.
The Sales Coach allows reps to practice pitching, handling objections, or negotiating before meeting with real customers.
“Using RAG, Einstein finds the relevant information in Salesforce — such as previous correspondence with that customer or external files provided, like buyer personas and buyer journey documents — and generates contextual responses in the buyer’s tone back to the seller during the role-play. For example, if a deal is in the negotiation stage, Einstein can create a role-play scenario sourced from the relevant context, including the opportunity record and buyer persona materials, to simulate the target buyer and engage in pricing negotiations.”
Einstein Sales Coach “incorporates insights from thought leaders and reputable publications when offering seller feedback.” Feedback includes next steps identified in Salesforce and overdue tasks and uploaded content such as sales methodologies and objection handling.
Einstein Sales Coach provides both positive and critical roleplay feedback for current deal scenarios. Next Steps are also called out.
During calls, Einstein provides real-time feedback, noting competitor mentions with competitive insights and providing negotiation tips.
“Every AI conversation needs to be an ROI conversation, and that will happen only when AI augments your team to accelerate growth,” argued Sales Cloud GM Ketan Karkhanis. “Every sales team needs more at-bats and more enablement to accelerate close rates, and that’s what these new autonomous sales agents will help drive. The sales team of the future is humans working with AI to drive sales success.”
ZoomInfo Copilot delivers account-based insights, buyer recommendations, and next best actions to sales reps.
ZoomInfo formally launched its Copilot service, which embeds GenAI capabilities within its GTM platform. The firm claims that Copilot “turns every seller into your best seller.”
Over 20,000 users have participated in the Copilot beta, and “their results and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive.”
ZoomInfo claims its users report being 60% more productive with Copilot. They also reduced time spent on research and manual tasks by ten hours per week, and 71% uncovered new opportunities at existing accounts.
Furthermore, ZoomInfo Copilot surfaced signals related to 45% of the open opportunities in their CRM.
ZoomInfo Copilot improves the efficiency and efficacy of sales reps. (Source: Q1 2024 $ZI earnings presentation).
“In today’s GTM environment, data by itself isn’t enough. Modern sales is becoming a science. It’s not enough to know who your buyer is — you need to know what they care about, exactly when they are in market, and what problems they’re facing right now,” posted ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck on LinkedIn. “And this information is out there in the form of digital buying signals. We have more information than ever about our buyers, but there’s too much noise.”
While signals such as sales triggers, visitor intelligence, and intent data sets continue to expand in depth and accuracy, delivering them in a coherent, holistic, and actionable way has proven difficult. Simply being told that somebody visited your website or there was an executive change at a prospect isn’t actionable because valuable signals get lost in the noise. Most individual signals do not assist with prioritization, identifying the buying committee, or writing an email that cuts through inbox noise. That is why sales assistants such as ZoomInfo Copilot will be warmly greeted.
“We built ZoomInfo Copilot to change that — to push these insights directly to sellers, teeing up outreach for the best leads at exactly the right moment,” continued Schuck. “Copilot turns ZoomInfo from a contact lookup tool into a platform that surfaces the key insights sellers need to take action against each day.”
Copilot also supports AI-guided prospecting that prioritizes sales rep activities on a redesigned home page. The ranked list of target accounts, based on historical deal analysis, employs sales triggers such as intent signals and executive scoops (ZoomInfo’s term for business events) to prioritize outbound activity.
CRM deal analysis identifies the “DNA of your best-fit customers and uses ZoomInfo’s leading go-to-market data to identify the best-fit accounts for you,” said CPO Dominik Facher. “Copilot generates natural language explanations of why an account has been prioritized so you have all the context to successfully engage.”
Copilot supports Salesforce and HubSpot for building target account lists, with additional CRMs planned in subsequent releases. Data is ingested from the Opportunity and Account record types.
To further assist prospecting, ZoomInfo surfaces buying committee members “who are most likely to engage,” which admins can curate and push out to their frontline sellers.
Sales Intelligence vendors have long said that their offerings helped reps know “who to call, when to call, and what to say.” However, this data was often raw information that needed to be analyzed by reps and messaged to prospects on an individual account basis. Not only does Copilot prioritize activities across their book of business and suggest the next best actions, but it can even recommend the channels on which individual buyers are most likely to respond.
“Marketers can access a ranked and prioritized list of the companies and buyers in-market, based on millions of signals analyzed and prioritized by ZoomInfo Copilot’s AI every day, directly from the homepage feed,” blogged Schuck. “ZoomInfo Copilot’s intelligent recommendations are presented in the language of today’s sellers to make taking action as easy and intuitive as possible. Users can explore each opportunity in more depth and engage with those opportunities directly from the Homepage Feed.”
Users can select between different persona definitions and filter by CRM presence and “likelihood to engage.”
Copilot sports an AI Email Assistant that employs GenAI to compose messaging around selected insights.
The Copilot includes an AI Email Assistant to simplify outbound, personalized outreach. Emails are generated based on the seller’s objective, previous account context, additional context offered by the sales rep, and ZoomInfo insights. The sales rep can select from three generated options and adjust the length or tone. Users have the option to email one or multiple individuals and can specify which insights should be used when generating the email.
Copilot assists with buying group discovery, “Pulling insights from websites, case studies, earnings call summaries, and many more real-time signals, ZoomInfo Copilot automatically creates buying groups of individuals who are most likely to engage and align with their ideal customer profiles.”
Copilot shortens the time to value for new users by automating personalization, including ICP and persona definition. Traditionally, new Sales Intelligence platform users spend hours customizing the platform, defining target personas, ICP, companies of interest, topics of interest, etc. Much of this process is automated by Copilot, allowing sales reps to immediately begin deriving value.
“When someone gets onboarded, we build out what we call a customer context database. We essentially go and do a lot of research on that company, what are their value props? What are their pain points? Who are their end users? And then we start to infer what topics, buying committees, types of companies that they’re interested in,” ZoomInfo VP of Data Strategy Brandon Tucker explained to GZ Consulting. “And then as they start to engage with the signals, or set some of those configurations on their own, they start to get even more relevant insights.”
ZoomInfo Copilot supports GenAI account queries.
A GenAI chat interface answers account questions, “giving users the answers they need quickly using conversational AI. Users can request answers on a range of account-level topics to get up to speed as quickly as possible.”
Copilot “meets you where you are,” including desktop, weekly email digests, Slack alerts, Chrome extension, and a mobile app.
“ZoomInfo Copilot also allows salespeople to seize time-sensitive opportunities in real-time with Breaking Alerts delivered through Slack,” blogged Schuck. “These alerts can be shared across multiple channels, allowing teams to quickly triage emerging opportunities and act decisively on high-quality intent signals.”
The Personalized Target Account Digest alerts users when prospects are “showing the right signals” and explains why now is a good time for reaching out to the prospect. Users can drill down into greater detail, compose an email, or export a prospect to the CRM.
Thus, “signals drive your actions,” said Facher.
ZoomInfo Copilot ingests ZoomInfo’s first- and third-party data to deliver “detailed overviews of specific accounts, including pain points and use cases, upcoming deals, important contacts, a summary of previous engagements, and more.”
“Finding the time to understand every account is a tall ask,” stated Facher. However, “Copilot effortlessly summarizes the need to know and the nice to know for any account, based on ZoomInfo, your CRM, and the engagements you’ve had with your customers, like emails or calls, to generate a holistic picture of an account’s health, its history, and the opportunity.”
Thus, reps can have a “detailed understanding” of any account “in seconds” and establish a “shared foundation” of account knowledge across the account team.
“Get briefed, get aligned, and get selling,” concluded Facher.
ZoomInfo contends that its Copilot has a significant advantage over other offerings due to the breadth and quality of its reference content and engagement data.
Account AI summarizes the account with multi-dimensional views.
“What sets ZoomInfo’s Copilot apart from any other solution in the market is that it is sitting on top of our AI-ready trusted data foundation that drives decisions, personalization, and confidence,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “AI is only as good as the data it’s built on, and most solutions are layered on top of static CRM data.”
Schuck argued that ZoomInfo is well-positioned in the emerging Copilot space as it offers high-quality data for maintaining enterprise software platforms and grounding its Copilot. Among its verified data assets are third-party reference data, second-party intent data, and first-party engagement and conversational insights:
“Copilot takes signals like website visitors, spikes in job postings, earnings call transcripts, contract renewal dates, and expert calls that indicate spending or competitive threats, then uses advanced entity resolution and matching to combine them with customers’ first-party data,” stated Schuck on ZoomInfo’s recent earnings call. “It then applies AI technology to model and inform users immediately about which companies are in the market for their product and how and why you should engage with them.
“For our customers, understanding firmographics alone is not sufficient to understand whether or not your next buyer is about to be in-market for your product,” continued Schuck. “It’s only when you surround that core data with signals that you’re able to predict who your next customer should be.”
ZoomInfo feeds data and buyer signals into Copilot to identify the right buyer during the buyer research process.
Copilot looks to identify in-market accounts and buyers during the research phase, relying on a broad set of hidden buyer signals (e.g., intent, competitive research, job postings, earnings calls, website visits) before the buyer raises their hand. The research window is the period during which sales and marketing have the greatest opportunity to influence the problem framing and preliminary vendor list.
But cold-calling into the TAM absent signals is very wasteful, as roughly only 10% of the ICP is in the market.
“Very few of the buyers that you’re looking for are in-market during the time you’re looking at them, and the ability to pinpoint those isn’t very easy today,” explained Product Marketing SVP Jam Khan to GZ Consulting. “So you can use predictive analytics. You can make your best guess when you have a fairly broken MQL system. ABM vendors have tried to come up with a different point of view, but it doesn’t quite replace the MQL.”
Copilot looks to identify the “chasm of opportunity” between signal generation and the first point of contact.
“The bridge we’re trying to gap is the difference between being first in a deal and being second in a deal,” argued Khan. “You’re never going to have a crystal ball that lets you anticipate before a buyer ever even starts making their decision. But that short little window is the difference between winning and losing.”
Copilot looks to “solve for the chasm” and give sales teams a first-mover advantage. While this “window of opportunity is really small,” it is the difference between hitting .200 and .300, analogized Khan. “To the extent where you’re able to act on those, that’s the difference between hitting your number and missing your number.”
Thus, other GenAI or Copilot offerings that pull data from the CRM face a trio of problems when generating recommendations. CRM data is limited to what has been keyed into it. As this data is historical (and reps hate maintaining CRM data), it is likely to be outdated, stale, and inaccurate.
“Third, it lacks the outside signals and insights that drive modern go-to-market motions. ZoomInfo Copilot delivers a full picture built on the foundation of the world’s most accurate and up-to-date business data, publishes real-time insights, and turns that into personalized and relevant content,” stated Schuck.
“Copilot is one of the best pieces of software we built at ZoomInfo, across ease-of-use, end-to-end understanding of our customers’ pain points and product market fit. We have had leading AI models in production for years,” crowed Schuck. “We expect to monetize Copilot and we’ll roll it out in a thoughtful way, focusing first on the customers who are most likely to get significant value out of the advanced platform. Our go-to-market teams are excited to bring this to their customers, and I have a lot of conviction around the upgrade paths in our customer base.”
Earnings Scoops, the latest content set to be collected and fed into Copilot, extend ZoomInfo’s technology and business event Scoops into SEC filing analysis. The service ingests 10-Ks (annual), 8-Ks (Material announcements), international filings, and earnings transcripts. It then outputs a set of condensed topical summaries. Earnings Scoops leverage GenAI to analyze customer and prospect competitors, goals, initiatives, pain points, and SWOT elements. They are also fed into its beta Copilot service.
Earnings Scoops are assigned metatags from a set of 150 Scoops topics that assist with searching and Copilot customization. This additional tagging helps tailor Scoop presentation to each firm’s ICP and is displayed in a Scoops Topics column (see a subset of topics from Meta’s recent earnings on the right).
“Many organizations still struggle to provide frontline sellers with actionable go-to-market insights distilled from the myriad of available signals,” said IDC Analyst Roger Beharry Lall. “While AI can sift through mountains of data, solutions must be built on a foundation of fresh, accurate, and clean data in order to deliver meaningful intelligence. Suppliers like ZoomInfo that can combine robust data sets with novel AI capabilities will help customers lead their markets by enabling engagement to the right people with the right message at precisely the right moment.”
While Schuck is confident in Copilot and ZoomInfo’s ability to monetize it, Schuck does not believe it will significantly grow revenue in H2.
“It’s going to take longer than that. I have a lot of confidence because I personally pitched this product across dozens of our customers, across all segments, and all industries,” argued Schuck. “From a product market fit, I don’t think we’ve been ever so close to fit as we have been with Copilot, outside of the core company and contact data. And so, I have a tremendous amount of confidence that we’re going to be able to turn that enthusiasm into monetization, but I also expect it to happen over time.”
The Homepage prioritizes accounts with next best action recommendations.
TechTarget released the latest update to Priority Engine, with expanded sales intelligence insights, workflows, and data syncing. Enhancements support greater Salesforce functionality and additional Prospect-Level Intent use cases. Prospect-level intent is generated from GDPR-compliant activity across its network of 150 enterprise technology media sites and over 1,000 topical video channels.
“To serve the more than 30 million opted-in members (your buyers) across our information networks and keep them coming back, we have to stay on top of their rapidly evolving information needs,” blogged CMO John Steinert. “We need to anticipate where categories and organizations are going and be there for our members. And that means, for our tech vendor clients, we can be the best possible source of insights into what’s happening in their hyper-specific categories, for both strategic and tactical – lead gen or otherwise — purposes. We help them turn our audiences (represent their markets) into more demand, better leads, and healthier opportunity pipelines.”
Furthermore, Prospect-Level Intent improves both sales and marketing performance. For example, email nurture campaigns that target active buyers and prospect interests “commonly result in dramatically higher CTRs vs. cold contact outreach.”
Likewise, outbound sales activity targeting active prospects with demonstrated intent enjoy “significantly higher” call conversion rate.
A TechTarget analysis of over 350,000 opportunities across 90,000 accounts found that TechTarget-influenced deals progressed to closed/won status 35% faster than other opportunities.
“When B2B tech buyers need to solve business problems, they come to TechTarget first because we provide both the independent decision-support editorial content they respect and the vendor content they seek in a context that caters to their buying ‘jobs-to-be-done.’ Priority Engine provides our clients with deep insight into these buying team and buyer’s journey interactions so they can better capitalize on real demand taking shape in their markets. This release gets this proprietary data directly into more GTM users’ hands and makes it easier for them to drive critical impact for their organizations.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
TechTarget improved its Salesforce syncing and real-time territory management. Syncing supports both standard Account and Opportunity objects and custom fields associated with these objects.
For example, customers may now build and dynamically update Priority Engine Account Lists using customer first-party account attributes such as target account lists, accounts in specific geos, or by opportunity status.
Priority Engine also supports syncing of third-party data sources stored in Account custom fields such as 6sense stages, Demandbase minutes, or Bombora scores to build Account Lists.
TechTarget VP of Corporate Communications Garrett Mann provided additional detail on the benefits of improved syncing to GZ Consulting: “The ability to dynamically sync and automatically update Priority Engine Account Lists based on customer first-party data and third-party data enables several benefits across sales, marketing, and ABM use cases, for example: (1) The ability to set and continuously update sales rep territories based on Account Owner, ensuring sales reps using Priority Engine are always seeing insights and new prospects from current account targets; (2) the ability to integrate separately purchased 6sense, Demandbase, and/or Bombora data with Priority Engine Account Intent for a single source of truth; (3) the ability to export into MAP nurture opted-in TechTarget prospects from Accounts where both TechTarget and 3rd party intent providers are seeing down-funnel demand; (4) and the ability to target TechTarget lead generation or advertising campaigns using this data.”
Other Priority Engine enhancements include:
An improved user experience and navigation that expedites account monitoring. Intent insights include new buying team members engaging, named prospects and customers researching competitors, or accounts accessing late-stage decision-making content.
A new account journey visualization that displays valuable demand-related activities at accounts across both client systems and the TechTarget network.
Streamlined user management and administration for target account lists and territory management. Admins will also benefit from simplified seat license administration and usage dashboards.
A new Opportunity Dashboard in Salesforce that displays the progression of opportunities, where go-to-market teams should take action, and where TechTarget has influenced deals.
The new Opportunity Dashboard may be viewed by deal counts or dollar volume.The Opportunity Dashboard Top Influenced Accounts.
“No matter your stack, realizing the value of RevOps sinks or swims based on the accuracy and quality of the intent and contact data – and TechTarget has that in droves,” said Sales Community Founder Randy Seidl, “The backbone of any successful GTM revenue motion isn’t how many tools you have, it’s about the insights and data that you’re using in them that unlocks value.”
This is part II of my discussion of Data Axle. On Monday I covered the launch of its Audience360 cloud-based data management platform.
B2B data vendor Data Axle announced expanded US content coverage, including additional depth for federal contractors, startups, nonprofits, and medical professionals. Organizational counts grew five percent, with Data Axle “adding hundreds of thousands of sought-after businesses and millions of new or updated contacts,” with “new attributes [that] are incredibly accurate and reliable,” explained Senior PR Manager Courtney Black to GZ Consulting. “Businesses can use this data to effectively identify prospects, which is particularly important in the current economic climate.”
New coverage includes 20 thousand more startups, 100 thousand federal contracting businesses, 100 thousand medical professionals, 35 thousand restaurants and bars, 500 thousand nonprofit organizations, and two million other US-based companies.
The medical professionals dataset spans 44 medical occupation titles and 124 specialties.
The federal contracting coverage has long offered ownership flags for veteran, minority, and women-owned businesses. Data Axle added Unique Entity Identifiers (UEI) alongside the expanded coverage.
Startup profiles include names, address fields, phone numbers, industry codes, corporate email addresses, websites, Twitter, and other social media handles. The firm recently added a source of technology startups but did not disclose the name.
Nonprofit profiles include EINs (federal tax ids). As most nonprofits do not earn revenue, the data set focuses on modeled machine-learning employee counts. Board members are included in the coverage.
Data Axle publishes data on 16.8 million US and 1.1 million Canadian businesses.
Data Axle content spans nearly 18 million US and Canadian verified businesses and 150 million business contacts. Data Axle also added or updated 10.3 million contact records, with “superior coverages of firmographics, such as industry type, professional specialty, cuisine, and geocoding.”
“All our products benefit from the extended datasets,” explained Data Axle Marketing SVP Kara Alvarez to GZ Consulting. “Business data is added to Data Axle’s platform in real time as we identify updates, and each of our products and services leverages this central fulfillment platform as do many clients.”
Among the benefits listed by Alvarez were:
B2C Link connections offer more contact-to-consumer connections, tying together business and consumer profiles.
Data Axle products, including Genie (formerly Sales Genie), USA, Exact Data, and Reference, etc., enjoy expanded business data. For example, Genie contains “attributes specific to the use cases Genie clients focus on as opposed to the more extensive set available in our data platform.”
Data Axle’s standard and custom programmatic audiences “are always current” in any channel. Partner ecosystem audiences “also benefit as they ingest those updates.”
“At Data Axle, we are constantly seeking to expand the number of records available to our clients while simultaneously ensuring that the quality of our premium verified data remains at the highest level possible,” said Data Axle CEO Michael Iaccarino. “Our clients count on us for data at scale but also accuracy. We focus on carefully integrating machine learning into our processes. However, we will never cease leveraging human verification. We make over 20 million calls yearly to ensure details and key information are correct.”
Data Axle also gathers consumer data, so its B2C Link dataset benefits from the increased breadth of businesses and medical professionals.
“As a leading provider of consumer data in addition to business datasets, Data Axle plays a vital role in establishing a crucial connection between businesses and consumer profiles,” stated the firm. “The recent addition of business contacts in Q2 further strengthens this connection. Data is available separately for organizations looking to build insights between the two datasets or as a prebuilt set of audiences.”
Demandbase Smarter Sales Intelligence brings together first and third-party intelligence.
ABX PlatformDemandbase announced a Smarter Sales Intelligence solution that combines Demandbase Sales Intelligence with additional tools, data, and prescriptive insights. UX enhancements include prescriptive dashboards with personalized account and contact recommendations.
The firm had a little fun with its press release, publishing a semi-tongue twister headline, “Demandbase Saves Stressed Sellers by Simplifying Sales with Smarter Sales Intelligence.” But wait! There’s More! Demandbase also released a 90-second infomercial touting their Sales Intelligence solution that “consolidates sales intelligence tools in both first and third-party data, and all in one place. It’s like having a superpower for smarter selling! Get easy access to insights, best-in-class predictive models, and contact recommendations integrated within your existing tools.”
Many of the UX changes were based on customer feedback, with the critical account information at the top. Content includes the journey stage, top intent keywords, people, predictive scores, and firmographics.
“The idea is that we’re bringing all the information that sellers care about and then presenting it on one screen so that they don’t have to go places to find it,” explained Demandbase Senior Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier to GZ Consulting. “It’s a unification of the data.”
Sellers “don’t enjoy the research aspect” of account-based selling, continued Breier. “They just want to be doing outreach.” Therefore, Demandbase is “meeting the sales reps “wherever there’s spending time, whether that is their browser, CRM, or SEP.”
The Prescriptive Sales Dashboard provides a “unified and prioritized view of a seller’s territory/account list.”
Prescriptive Sales Dashboards proactively inform sellers where they should direct their attention, when they should reach out, and what they should say. Both accounts and contacts are recommended, with suggestions specific to each rep’s territory. The Dashboard calls out the top accounts and contacts for outreach based on activity and intent; that is, which leads have the highest probability of converting into opportunities.
The Sales Dashboard offers multiple filters, identifying accounts that:
“I should reach out this week.”
“have been in the news recently.”
“are most engaged.”
“have the highest intent.”
“have a high likelihood to become an opportunity.”
And contacts that
“I should reach out this week.”
“Are not in my CRM.”
“Are part of the buying group and from Top Accounts.”
“Are former buyers.”
“Are trending on my website.”
High engagement lists are likely to be compelling for reps. In many cases, they will be aware of the engagement as they are directly involved. Still, there will also be situations where they are unaware of the engagement (e.g., Customer Success set up a trial at the account or individuals attended a webinar or responded to a marketing campaign) and missing an opportunity for outreach.
Recommendations are not black-boxed but include engagement data and known contacts in the buying group. If a rep disagrees with a recommendation, a feedback button helps train the model.
“One of the biggest risks when you’re trying to get adoption from the sales persona on something like this, is losing their trust,” explained Breier. “We want to give some context and qualify the recommendation that we’re making.”
Demandbase also identifies and recommends contacts for outreach, even if they aren’t currently in the CRM. Along with names and titles, Demandbase feeds emails, mobile phones, technographics, intent signals, and persona-based messaging. New fields include Demandbase’s predictive scores:
Pipeline Predict Score: How likely an account will become a pipeline opportunity.
Qualification Score: Likelihood an account will ever become a customer, regardless of where it is in the buyer journey.
Demandbase continues to build out its data coverage, with 83 million companies, 147 million contacts, 87 million emails, and 40 million direct dials. Much of its third-party content was integrated after they acquired InsideView and DemandMatrix two years ago.
Account Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).People Insights displayed within the Outreach Demandbase tab (new UX).
Furthermore, Demandbase simplified its user interface to display the most important information about prospects and customers.
Demandbase announced a native Outreach integration with other SEPs in development. Streamlining Sales Intelligence and Sales Engagement allows reps to “focus on engaging with prospects and closing deals, rather than wasting time on manual tasks.” The I-frame integration supports core Demandbase Sales Intelligence functionality within Outreach workflows. For example, sales reps can research companies and contacts, build lists, and launch Outreach sequences inside of Outreach.
The Demandbase Sales Intelligence Watchlist displayed as an I-frame tab in Outreach.
Users will see common information, tools, and workflows presented in the same format as their CRM but in Outreach’s Account, Prospect, and Opportunity records. There is also a standalone tab in Outreach similar to the Demandbase standalone tab found in CRMs. This Custom Tab supports company and contact searching, prospect list building, connection management for warm introductions, customer and prospect news tracking, and custom buying trigger configuration.
“We’ve noticed that the order of preference as far as where sellers spend time actually starts with their SEP – So, Outreach. And if they have to, they’ll go to CRM,” observed Demandbase Product Marketing Manager Travis Breier. “When you look at Outreach users who have Demandbase and Outreach, they can spend all of their time within Outreach and never have to go to the Demandbase platform. They’re not missing out on any information… It’s just one less thing that they have to learn and one less barrier to access the Demandbase information.”
“Being a seller has never been easy, but the proliferation of data and tools has led to stressed-out sellers with lost productivity, lower quota attainment, and less revenue,” says Gabe Rogol, chief executive officer at Demandbase. “With our simplified and smarter Sales Intelligence solution, reps no longer need to waste precious time figuring out their next steps and executing them. Instead, they can close more deals and make more money. Think of our intelligence as a sales superpower, all within the tools sellers use every day.”
Demandbase Sales Intelligence is integrated with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Outreach, Slack, and browsers. The Sales Engagement integration enables reps to add contacts to Outreach sequences and personalize the messaging.
“Integrating Demandbase’s Sales Intelligence directly within our platform will unlock new levels of value for sales teams looking to efficiently create and predictably close more pipeline,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina. “With this next-generation integration, sellers can more easily and quickly find and contact accounts, get data-focused insights, and unlock new levels of productivity — all while never leaving the Outreach Sales Execution Platform.”
Demandbase recently dropped the Cloud Designations for its products, emphasizing its unified functionality within the Demandbase One platform.
“We found that it kind of creates this illusion of complexity that we don’t feel serves it justice as far as the actual products you’re spending time in,” said Palmer. “They’re even more interconnected. Most of our customers are now buying three or more products. We’ve got bundles and packages of everything, so we’ve just moved away from that whole cloud nomenclature to just Demandbase One.”
A Hot Leads feature that provides SDRs with key engagement insights and the ability to take action on unknown leads will soon be available. Hot Leads will be displayed in the Prescriptive dashboards and identified by engagement activity, intent, recency, news/company/job changes, technographics, etc. Hot Leads will be GDPR and PII compliant.
In other news, Demandbase was named a Notable Provider in Forrester’s Account-Based Selling Technologies Landscape, Q2, 2023 report. Seventeen vendors were included in the report. Account-Based Sales vendors “improve visibility into the potential of each account; increase sales rep efficiency; and increase pipeline value (deal size), win rates, and forecast accuracy.”
“The landscape for B2B GTM teams continues to change at [a] breakneck pace. At Demandbase, we’re committed to shaping that market evolution to empower our customers to achieve their most audacious goals,” said Demandbase CPO Brewster Stanislaw. “This year, we’ve placed a deep focus on making sellers’ jobs easier and more effective with AI-powered insights and seamless workflows, and we believe our inclusion in this report further validates that direction.”
LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago. As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers. New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.
LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality. However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”
LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.
Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities. Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).
The new Sales Navigator Account Hub.
The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities. It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.
“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis. “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data. Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”
The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:
Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence. Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub. Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them. Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent
Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1. Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category. The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.
Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole. The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.
“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.
At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts. Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.
“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare. “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals. Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies. With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities
New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages. These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).
Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:
Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
New connections to colleagues
LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website
“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment. If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance. If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix. “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”
Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”
Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.
Other Search enhancements include:
A simplified saved search UX
A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
Current job title and past job title filters
The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions. Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.
LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year. The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment. At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.
B2B DaaS vendor SalesIntel shifted away from credit-based data pricing to unlimited data access to its firmographics, technographics, contacts (including emails and direct dials), and news alert intelligence. Pricing is based on the number of users, with unlimited access to downloads, exports, and data enrichment.
”SalesIntel’s unlimited everything plan removes the friction, frustration, and predatory pricing so many customers experience when working with other B2B data providers.” comments SalesIntel CEO Manoj Ramnani. “We are proud to be a true partner to this industry by leading a pricing revolution that will help go-to-market teams build limitless pipeline.”
SalesIntel’s unlimited content includes:
300 million unique technology installs across 22 million accounts. Technographics span 18,000 technologies.
100 million email-verified contacts. Of these, over 17 million are maintained by SalesIntel editors and regularly reverified to maintain a 95% accuracy level.
B2B account news and alerts for 22 million companies organized into 32 categories.
Contracts include the RevDriver Chrome extension, Bombora intent data, and platform integrations (e.g., Salesforce, Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, Marketo).
Licenses also include access to SalesIntel’s Research-on-Demand editors for finding new contacts or reverifying contact information. Research on Demand is subject to credits, but at 120 per seat, the cap is generous.
SalesIntel has simplified pricing based on the number of seats.
Under credit-based pricing models, “Marketing is worried about not having enough credits for campaigns, Sales is worried about not having enough credits to effectively prospect, and RevOps is worried that there won’t be enough credits to keep all this data clean.”
Removing credit-based pricing offers several benefits to customers:
Budgeting is simplified as the total cost of a SalesIntel contract is known when the contract is signed. RevTech teams do not need to create mid-year POs if credits are running low or additional marketing campaigns are planned.
RevOps does not need to allocate and monitor credits across multiple teams or reallocate a dwindling set of credits at the end of the year.
Marketing can run enrichment, including visitor enrichment, and updates as frequently as they’d like, limiting the impact of data decay on their account, contact, and lead data.
Marketing can regularly analyze and expand its ICP and test new verticals without worrying about credits.
Sales Reps can research and sync key contacts to their SEP or CRM without worrying about using up their allotted credits halfway through the year.
Furthermore, SalesIntel does not include any “data destroy” clauses, a legal issue that some incumbent vendors employ to increase the cost to defectors.
CMO James Lamberti explained to GZ Consulting that credit-based pricing “becomes a barrier to value for the customer,” with customers feeling “trapped” by usage limits. “We want people to begin to appreciate the full depth and breadth of our data and to leverage it in ways to make themselves more efficient.”
Ramnani argued that SalesIntel customers enjoy value via “three very simple steps:
We help them identify their ICP using the intelligence from our firmographic and technographic data.
Then, we apply the intelligence of news and intent data to see who from their ICP is in the market today.
Within those in-market companies, our customers enjoy direct conversations using mobile phones and direct dials.”
However, “context is everything.” Vendors that provide large contact sets without the context of an ICP, account news, and intent data (i.e., steps 1 and 2) are providing names and numbers but fostering inefficiency in their go-to-market. Targeting is more than simply finding many names. Revenue teams need to know whom to call, when to call, and what to say.
SalesIntel can offer unlimited data access because it owns all of its data except for Bombora’s intent file.
Historically, Sales Intelligence services offered seat-based pricing, and marketing data vendors provided volume-based pricing. When services began serving both departments, credit-based models were crafted on top of seat-based pricing, creating complex and frustrating pricing. SalesIntel is looking to return to simple pricing and “partner with the industry” based on “the value of our data and the quality of our software,” argued Lamberti.
Lamberti described the sweet spot for this model as the mid-market – firms between 40 and 50 employees and several hundred. These firms have some maturity in their marketing stack and go-to-market motion, with multiple BDRs and sellers.
However, “if you’re just a ten-person team with one seller and one BDR, we’ll certainly do business. We’re going to have a package for them. But the unlimited package is really so that we can go after the market where we really are a great fit, where we win.”
“Strategically, we know that this is the time to strike. We’re not VC-backed. This is where Manoj has got the right [employee-shareholder] strategy,” argued Lamberti. The firm is not subject to the financial pressure of outside equity investors or public markets. Thus, the new pricing is designed strategically “to gain share and grow our market footprint dramatically.” SalesIntel contracts are annual with multi-year discounts. Pricing starts at around $11,000, with additional seats priced at $1,200. Current customers that renew early can convert to the new pricing structure.
Crowd-based Company Research vendor Owler added contacts to its Owler Max Sales Intelligence service. Owler was launched in 2011 by Jim Fowler after he sold contacts database Jigsaw (renamed Data.com but now decommissioned) to Salesforce. Both databases employed a “wisdom of the crowd” approach to collecting data, but Owler offered only the CEO name and executive change news alerts. Broader contact details for its 15 million company profiles were not available until now.
Owler grew into a respected database for competitive tracking, funding data, and news alerts but avoided contact data. As it increasingly positioned itself as a sales tool, it needed to address its lack of contacts.
Contact Data, which is only being added to its top-end Max edition, includes direct phone numbers, email addresses, and LinkedIn profiles for 150 million North American professionals. Along with firmographics, users can filter contacts by Job Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Location.
Contact data is available via Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chrome.
‘We are very excited to introduce Contact Data into our Owler Max tool. This is a powerful way to get in touch with potential customers and partners,” stated CEO Tim Harsch. “Our goal has always been to make it easier for companies to grow and succeed, and this new addition to our platform will help our users do just that.”
Contacts may be filtered by Name, Title, Seniority, Department, Hiring Date, and Current Location.
IT Sales & Marketing Intelligence vendor TechTarget enhanced its intent capabilities with Confirmed Projects, a set of verified projects obtained via direct interviews with a buying team member. Confirmed Projects are planned for the next twelve months and include purchase requirements, challenges, desired outcomes, location, timeframe, and the vendor short-list.
Confirmed Projects are available through TechTarget’s Priority EngineSales Intelligence service. Project contact data are triple verified (email, phone, and employment) along with the contacts’ role in the purchase process.
“Confirmed Projects include specific insights on the technical and business purchase considerations in-market accounts are looking to address — intelligence that will dramatically increase seller efficiency and productivity because they now know where and how to concentrate their efforts to get in on real deals,” stated the firm.
Priority Engine’s enhanced territory filtering helps sales reps home in on their best opportunities.
“Thousands of B2B sellers use Priority Engine every day to fuel their outbound efforts by discovering new active buyers in their territories plus prospect-level intent that helps them break through,” said CPO Andrew Briney. “The integration of Confirmed Projects into Priority Engine gives them a unique ability to attack and revive stalled mid-funnel opportunities with precise, actionable details on verified purchase plans.”
The value proposition of Priority Engine with Confirmed Projects
