Less than a year after Demandbase joined forces with Engagio, the company announced it acquired InsideView, a leader in sales and marketing intelligence, and DemandMatrix, a top provider of technographic data and intelligence. Both acquisitions will significantly expand the Demandbase One B2B Go-To-Market Suite, which the company unveiled in November 2020, to provide users with a comprehensive understanding of accounts and the ability to take action across multiple channels. Together, the companies will empower Demandbase to offer the new Data Cloud and Sales Intelligence Cloud solutions on top of existing offerings — ABX Cloud and Advertising Cloud.
“We feel the B2B go-to-market technology space has been building to this moment,” said Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “I know that sounds grandiose, but after being in the space for a long time, I believe it. And I think the awareness of it was accelerated by Covid-19 and some of the things that were happening in the space. And specifically, what I mean by building to this is the data assets, the proprietary data assets coming together with the sales and marketing applications.
“You have Zoominfo and Dun & Bradstreet on one side, and then you have Marketo, 6sense, Terminus and Demandbase on the other. And I think combining both so you can partner with your customers much more flexibly, and because of the insight that you can get within your platform, is a natural evolution of where we’re going. And we can’t believe that we’re kind of the first to get here.”
Data is now a critical component of any successful B2B go-to-market strategy, and the Covid-19 pandemic only accelerated the need for a 360-degree view of an account. B2B marketers are now looking for five levels of data quality to fuel their strategies, and with the new acquisitions, Demandbase offers them all in a one-stop-shop — the Data Cloud and the Sales Intelligence Cloud — powered by InsideView and DemandMatrix:
- Firmographics: InsideView will provide firmographic data that includes information on more than 20 million accounts worldwide, including financials, employee counts, market segments, industries, location, news and corporate hierarchy information.
- Technographics: DemandMatrix technographic data provides insight into a company’s current tech stack, future technology needs, technology-based skill set trends, cloud consumption revenue and IT Spend.
- Intent: Intent data reveals the topics that companies are actively consuming across the web.
- Account Identification: Account Identification provides the ability to identify the anonymous account of any visitor on a webpage, making it essential to understand engagement, target and personalize account interactions, and measure the impact of account-based efforts.
- Contacts: InsideView contact data will provide insight on the people who work at the accounts, including name, function, job level, title, contact information (including phone), location and social networks.
“It became apparent that there are really five key data assets, but it’s a very fragmented market for B2B companies,” said Rogol. “We saw that nobody, with the possible exception of ZoomInfo, has brought all five of these together into a one-stop-shop, and we knew the three of us can do it. And, in addition to the Data Cloud solution, users will have API access to these data assets and a data integrity platform that enables them to automate cleaning their CRM. That’s really important because what we found by focusing so much on ABM is that the biggest thing that holds back successful ABM programs is your own data isn’t clean. So, the ability to have a solution that starts by cleaning your data and then allows you to dive into ABM is just incredibly valuable for customers.”
Demandbase Goes Beyond Account-Based Marketing
With these acquisitions, Demandbase is eager to take its offerings beyond just ABM or ABX (account-based experiences). “We think that’s really important because B2B enterprises have a number of go-to-market needs, and ABM is just one of them,” Rogol said. “ABM was pretty much everything we have done. But now, it’s one cloud and a broader solution.”
The next phase for Demandbase is what it calls the decoupling of its ad solution. A big part of the business is advertising, and Rogol said the company has worked to differentiate the offering. With InsideView now incorporated in the mix, users can go beyond aligning sales and marketing to provide insights about accounts to deepen prospecting intelligence, bringing marketing activity down to the contact level.
“We focus so much on B2B advertising more than anybody else,” said Rogol. “And we’ve seen that global enterprises often want a B2B ad platform, but maybe not at the same time that they want an ABM solution. So, we’re taking this step to make that a standalone cloud. In other words, we will have the only dedicated B2B ad solution out there, which is really exciting for us.”
Finally, the Data Cloud empowers Demandbase to become a data vendor that provides direct access to data for accounts and uses that data to power its own solutions — intelligence, advertising or ABX solutions. The Data Cloud will also include Data Integrity, a customer data management solution powered by InsideView that is designed to continuously clean, monitor and unify CRM data with reliable, up-to-date information.
“Our guiding principle — which we think will really differentiate us — is flexibility,” said Rogol. “So instead of having to buy everything, if you want direct access to data, we will have that; if you want to start with sales intelligence, we have that; if you just want an ad solution, we have that. I can’t overstate how important that is for global enterprises who are stuck with having to work with so many people and having to buy more than what they want. We’re going to be the flexible provider.”
InsideView & DemandMatrix To Operate As Standalone Businesses
Following the acquisition, both InsideView and DemandMatrix will operate as standalone businesses. Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView, and Meetul Shah, CEO of DemandMatrix, will lead their respective businesses to serve customers and find ways to cross-sell and integrate.
Additionally, Shah and Milletti will be members of the Demandbase executive team in general manager roles.
According to Rogol, all three companies already built an “exciting roadmap” together. The ability to tie all the elements of sales, marketing and data technologies together benefits InsideView customers with a one-stop-shop solution.
“We have about 1,000 different customers, and a lot of them are enterprise-type accounts,” said Milletti in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “One commonality is they tell us they have too many different pieces of sales, marketing and data technology. And they’re left in the middle to tie all of them together.
“Secondly, a lot of the data assets that DemandMatrix brings to the table, on top of what Demandbase collects around account identification, are very interesting to our customers,” he continued. “So, our own Data Cloud will become richer and more powerful. Lastly, as a bigger company, we’ll be able to accelerate our investment into our product. Our customers are always asking us to do more to generate more data and insights and integrate the data into the workflow, whether it be in our ABX workflow, CRM workflow or Sales Automation workflow. So I think as a combined larger company will be in a better position to invest.”
For DemandMatrix customers, the acquisition allows them to act on all the data effectively.
“Our customers have always asked us to provide them with a foundational layer to act on the data,” Shah told Demand Gen Report. “Can I get context for it; can I run ads against it; etc. So this now gives our customers this ability. I think the beauty of this whole solution is that it’s super complementary. It allows us to build a company that is not only the best go-to-market solution, but it allows us to go above that and empower customers from a data intelligence perspective. We can build a much larger and broader company together and innovate much faster because we are producing our own data.”
