I mentioned 6Sense briefly in a recent post about vendors who help companies find prospects on the Web. Since then, I’ve had a more detailed briefing, which clarified that their scope extends well beyond prospect lists to predictive models applied across all stages of the purchase cycle. We also clarified that users can extract company-level profiles including attributes (industry, revenue, etc.) and key activities (Web site visits, topics researched) and scores at both company and individual levels.
The extraction features are important – at least to me – because they determine whether 6Sense qualifies as a “customer data platform” (CDP), a type of system I see as fundamental for future marketing. As a quick refresher, CDP is defined as “a marketer-controlled system that supports external marketing execution based on persistent, cross-channel customer data.” The part about “supports external marketing execution” is where data extraction comes in: it means that external systems can access data within the CDP for their own use. 6Sense wouldn't be a CDP if it merely displayed its data on a CRM screen without letting the CRM system import it. If 6Sense exposed model scores but no other data, it would qualify as a CDP by the thinnest margin possible.
Of course, there are more important things about 6Sense than whether I consider it a CDP. Starting at the beginning, the system imports a list of each client’s customers and sales opportunities from CRM and marketing automation systems. Standard integrations are available for Salesforce.com, Oracle Eloqua and Marketo. APIs can load data from other sources, potentially including other CRM marketing automation products, Web logs and tags, order processing, bookings, call centers, media impressions, and pretty much anything else.
The system standardizes and deduplicates this data at the individual and company levels. It then matches against company profiles that 6Sense itself has gathered from the usual Web sources – public social media, Web sites, job boards, directories, etc. – and from a network of third-party Web sites. The Web site network is unusual if not unique among B2B data providers; the most similar offerings I can think of are audience profiles from B2C site networks, from owners of large B2B sites, and based on other B2B activity such as email response. The advantage of Web site activity is it finds companies early in the buying cycle, when they are most open to considering new vendors. The system can map known individuals to individuals on partner Web sites, using hashing techniques to avoid passing personally identifiable information. .
The result of all this is a database with deep company and individual profiles including both attributes and activities. 6Sense uses this to build company and individual-level predictive models. Company models score each company’s likelihood to buy from the client. Individual models predict the individual’s likelihood to be the best sales contact. Models are built by 6Sense staff using automated techniques and take about three weeks to complete.
The system can also estimate what product each company is most likely to purchase, when it will buy, and what stage it has reached in the buying process. Stages are defined in consultation with the client. Assignment rules might use purchase likelihood or a predictive model trained against a sample of companies in each buying stage.
Outputs from 6Sense can include lists of likely new prospect companies (not in the client’s existing database), contacts at those companies, current prospects organized by purchase stage and ranked by purchase likelihood, current contacts within each company, and key indicators that drive each company’s score. The key indicators can be very specific, such as searches for competitors’ names, visits to product detail pages, or activity by known leads.
Users can define segments based on these or other attributes and export their related data to CRM, marketing automation, ad targeting, or Web personalization systems via file transfers or API calls. 6Sense can also display the information on screen to help guide sales conversations and is now testing an extension to recommend specific talking points.
Pricing for 6Sense starts at more than $100,000 and is based on factors including the number of models created and volume of new net contacts provided. The company was founded in 2013 and released early versions of its product that same year. Formal release was in May 2014. It has ten current customers and more in the pipeline.
Showing posts with label b2b demand generation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label b2b demand generation. Show all posts
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Friday, August 30, 2013
LeadSpace Offers A No-Memory Approach to B2B Lead Scoring
My discussion last week of Infer, Mintigo, and Lattice Engines raised the question of what other B2B data vendors might be considered Customer Data Platforms. It’s easy to exclude companies that provide basic B2B lists (D&B, Data.com, Netprospex, ZoomInfo, etc.) since they’re clearly in a different business. But there’s another set of vendors that look very much like Mintigo, Infer, and Lattice Engines building detailed profiles by extracting data from Web sites, social networks, and other sources. This group includes InsideView, OneSource, SalesLoft and LeadSpace. So far as I know, none of them maintains a permanent copy of a client’s own customer file, which is the essence of being a Customer Data Platform. But if you’re a marketer needing to identify and score B2B prospects, you’d still want to give them a look.
I bring this up because a colleague suggested reconsider classifying LeadSpace as a CDP, which prompted me to learn more about them. Here’s what I found.
- LeadSpace, like the other vendors, scans Web sites, blogs, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn profiles, job hunting sites, and other sources to build a picture of a company’s business, managers, technologies, and similar attributes. Of course, every vendor argues it does this better than anyone else. I suspect there are indeed significant differences. But I haven’t done any testing or seen anyone else’s test results – so all I can say is that wise buyers will test for themselves before making a choice.
- LeadSpace does build lead scores, something its Web site doesn’t reflect. This is one of the major points of differentiation among vendors in this space, so it’s worth understanding exactly what kind of scores each company provides. In LeadSpace’s case, the company builds “ideal buyer profiles” that measure how similar a lead is to a sample of existing customers provided by a client. Most clients have multiple profiles for different products or customer segments. Other companies in this group build different types of scores: say, for response to a specific campaign, or becoming a sales accepted lead, or having a high lifetime value. Some also estimate the incremental financial value of taking an action. It’s easy for buyers to gloss over these differences, but that would be a big mistake: they largely what kinds f applications a system can support. So be sure to explore them in detail (or read our explanations once we release the CDP Report itself.)
- LeadSpace doesn’t maintain its own permanent master database of all companies on the Internet. Rather, it conducts a fresh scan as each client requests research into its target audience. This is another big difference from its competitors, who do run continuous scans and keep the results. LeadSpace argues that its approach avoids outdated information, saves the cost of storing and updating a persistent database, and lets the system collect precisely the right attributes for each situation – which can’t be known in advance. The company also points out that even a new scan will capture some history: the public Twitter feed goes back one year, as do job site listings. I have doubts about these arguments – I think older data can show important trends, am sure there’s plenty of outdated information on current Web pages, and suspect there’s the important attributes are pretty similar from one project to another. Perhaps LeadSpace is really making the subtler argument that the incremental value of older information doesn’t justify the incremental cost of scanning and storing it, which is perfectly possible. The company does store some old information, such as common job titles, to help analyze and classify inputs.
- LeadSpace doesn’t load a copy of its clients’ customer names, either. That’s essential for a CDP, which by definition has the potential of evolving into a primary marketing database. But it's not essential for LeadSpace's primary business of lead scoring, where even can be built on just a sample of a few hundred records. The arguments for and against the permanent master database also apply here, so I won’t repeat them. In addition, LeadSpace says its clients care more finding prospects with the right attributes, such as industry, company size, and technology fit, than trends in their behaviors or new job titles. Again, I’m not sure I agree, but should point out that LeadSpace mentioned combining their own scores with behavior data captured in marketing automation: so LeadSpace itself is at least implicitly acknowledging that behaviors are important.. LeadSpace's approach also means it can’t monitor a set of names and issue alerts when they do something interesting. This is definitely something salespeople like to do. LeadSpace is closing that particular gap by developing a service, soon to enter beta testing, that will do a monthly scan of a client’s customer records. It will feed the results back to the client's CRM or marketing automation, which themselves will highlight any changes.
- LeadSpace provides both prospect lists (i.e., new names) as well as data enhancement (i.e., information on names provided by the client). Most of its competitors also do both, but some do only enhancement. Again like its competitors, LeadSpace provides an interface for sales people to view the details associated with an existing customer. This is where its on demand approach comes in handy, since the interface can present information in categories tailored to each client’s needs. The system also lets sales people rate each lead with a thumbs up or thumbs down, providing feedback to fine tune the scoring model. I haven’t seen that particular feature in competitive systems but it’s not something I’ve specifically researched.
LeadSpace was founded in 2007 as a prospecting tool that let salespeople enter a company name and receive a list of individuals and their associated information and social conversations. The evolutionary path from there to the current system , launched in 2012, is fairly obvious. The company currently has more than 50 clients, mostly large B2B technology vendors. Pricing is based on the number of records either enhanced or provided in prospect lists, and starts around $25,000 per year.
I bring this up because a colleague suggested reconsider classifying LeadSpace as a CDP, which prompted me to learn more about them. Here’s what I found.
- LeadSpace, like the other vendors, scans Web sites, blogs, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn profiles, job hunting sites, and other sources to build a picture of a company’s business, managers, technologies, and similar attributes. Of course, every vendor argues it does this better than anyone else. I suspect there are indeed significant differences. But I haven’t done any testing or seen anyone else’s test results – so all I can say is that wise buyers will test for themselves before making a choice.
- LeadSpace does build lead scores, something its Web site doesn’t reflect. This is one of the major points of differentiation among vendors in this space, so it’s worth understanding exactly what kind of scores each company provides. In LeadSpace’s case, the company builds “ideal buyer profiles” that measure how similar a lead is to a sample of existing customers provided by a client. Most clients have multiple profiles for different products or customer segments. Other companies in this group build different types of scores: say, for response to a specific campaign, or becoming a sales accepted lead, or having a high lifetime value. Some also estimate the incremental financial value of taking an action. It’s easy for buyers to gloss over these differences, but that would be a big mistake: they largely what kinds f applications a system can support. So be sure to explore them in detail (or read our explanations once we release the CDP Report itself.)
- LeadSpace doesn’t maintain its own permanent master database of all companies on the Internet. Rather, it conducts a fresh scan as each client requests research into its target audience. This is another big difference from its competitors, who do run continuous scans and keep the results. LeadSpace argues that its approach avoids outdated information, saves the cost of storing and updating a persistent database, and lets the system collect precisely the right attributes for each situation – which can’t be known in advance. The company also points out that even a new scan will capture some history: the public Twitter feed goes back one year, as do job site listings. I have doubts about these arguments – I think older data can show important trends, am sure there’s plenty of outdated information on current Web pages, and suspect there’s the important attributes are pretty similar from one project to another. Perhaps LeadSpace is really making the subtler argument that the incremental value of older information doesn’t justify the incremental cost of scanning and storing it, which is perfectly possible. The company does store some old information, such as common job titles, to help analyze and classify inputs.
- LeadSpace doesn’t load a copy of its clients’ customer names, either. That’s essential for a CDP, which by definition has the potential of evolving into a primary marketing database. But it's not essential for LeadSpace's primary business of lead scoring, where even can be built on just a sample of a few hundred records. The arguments for and against the permanent master database also apply here, so I won’t repeat them. In addition, LeadSpace says its clients care more finding prospects with the right attributes, such as industry, company size, and technology fit, than trends in their behaviors or new job titles. Again, I’m not sure I agree, but should point out that LeadSpace mentioned combining their own scores with behavior data captured in marketing automation: so LeadSpace itself is at least implicitly acknowledging that behaviors are important.. LeadSpace's approach also means it can’t monitor a set of names and issue alerts when they do something interesting. This is definitely something salespeople like to do. LeadSpace is closing that particular gap by developing a service, soon to enter beta testing, that will do a monthly scan of a client’s customer records. It will feed the results back to the client's CRM or marketing automation, which themselves will highlight any changes.
- LeadSpace provides both prospect lists (i.e., new names) as well as data enhancement (i.e., information on names provided by the client). Most of its competitors also do both, but some do only enhancement. Again like its competitors, LeadSpace provides an interface for sales people to view the details associated with an existing customer. This is where its on demand approach comes in handy, since the interface can present information in categories tailored to each client’s needs. The system also lets sales people rate each lead with a thumbs up or thumbs down, providing feedback to fine tune the scoring model. I haven’t seen that particular feature in competitive systems but it’s not something I’ve specifically researched.
LeadSpace was founded in 2007 as a prospecting tool that let salespeople enter a company name and receive a list of individuals and their associated information and social conversations. The evolutionary path from there to the current system , launched in 2012, is fairly obvious. The company currently has more than 50 clients, mostly large B2B technology vendors. Pricing is based on the number of records either enhanced or provided in prospect lists, and starts around $25,000 per year.
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