PreditcLeads Blog

Company intelligence data in your Sales enablement platform

January 25, 2021 / Fanny L

You’re already aware that the more insights and data you have on your prospects, the better. Exactly how could you take advantage of this data and how could it be integrated into your sales enablement platform?

Sales enablement platforms are without a doubt incredibly valuable to sales teams. They have endless use cases as illustrated in the “SalesTech Landscape” below – such as engaging clients with smart messaging tools, improving productivity with easy to use sales resources, identifying leads and scoring them, and of course, the CRM that helps you stay on top of customers and prospects.

In the CRM, all the information you have on your customers should be tracked, which can be made manually by the SDR itself or automated using a 3rdparty system. Data like company name, contact information and demographics is usually logged into the CRM and creates a long lead list of prospects. For sales teams to become successful they usually need more information than this. Here’s how sales intelligence like company intelligence data can enrich sales enablement platforms and improve the performance of SDRs using it:

Personalized Outreach

All SDRs have heard the importance of being personal. No prospect wants to listen to some robot pitching their idea without knowing a single thing about them, their company or understanding what value their product can give them.

PredictLeads can provide insights to increase Personalization such as:

News Events alerts like “Company X receives Y Award” can give you an icebreaker to open up the conversation by congratulating them and letting them know you did your homework.
Key Customers data insights can help you identify if you and the customer share the same partners or clients to build familiarity and trust.

Sales Triggers

Imagine you have this very long list of leads in your CRM. You start making phone calls from the top but cannot seem to move the deal forward even though you’re having great rapport with prospects. The most likely reason is you’re not reaching out to the right prospects, the ones that are in the buy mode. Companies are not always looking to invest in products for many reasons. Maybe they’re already satisfied with what they have, or they don’t currently have the budget to invest in new software or the product that you’re selling. With sales triggers you can identify companies with signals indicative of growth – meaning the company is more likely to invest.

Examples of Sales Triggers PredictLeads provide are:

Company signs new client.
Company launches new product.
Company received financing.
Company increases headcount.
Company made a new integration.
Company expands facilities.

Targeting Leads

When sourcing for leads, most CRMs provides search functions with filters that help you target the right prospects. With more company data you can advance these search filters to create a more targeted approach. The more filters you can use, the better you can target prospects matching your ideal target persona.

How PredictLeads data can be used as filters for Targeting:

Technologies used in the company can help you identify prospects that are more likely to have an interest in buying your product. For example, if you’re selling a Salesforce extension product you’d want to target companies that are actually using Salesforce.
Companies Hiring for X category, if you’re selling a Marketing automation product you can filter companies hiring for Marketing category as they’re more likely to have a need for your product.

These are just a few examples on how company intelligence data can be integrated into your CRM or other sales enablement tools, and I’m sure there are hundreds more creative ways. One thing is for certain though – sales teams will benefit from using this data, because it’ll be doing all the research for them. This means that they can focus on what brings them most value – selling.

Fanny

Hiring intent data during pandemic

May 28, 2020 / Roq X

PredictLeads took the data for 5000 US based companies from different sectors and aggregated hiring intent data for each of the sectors. Our goal was to review how hiring intent correlates with pandemic consequences.

US states started pandemic lockdowns on March 19th and by mid April 90% of US population were under some form of lockdown.

Below we share three industries and how they were affected by Covid19 during this period and after.

For the IT industry our data shows downward trajectory of active job openings started on March 25th. On this day 20,000 job openings were slashed from the IT industry.

They were further decreased by nearly 130,000 job openings till May 28th 2020.

March

US unemployment rate rose from 3.8% to 4.5% in March. During last week of March 47,000 jobs were cut per PredictLeads data. In March the total number of job openings in the IT industry decreased by 6.8%.

April

US unemployment further rose in April to a record high of 14.4% during which 70,000 additional job openings were delisted in the IT industry alone – a staggering 12.8% decrease.

May

Data shows 51,000 job openings were removed in May (1st-28th). If there would be linear correlation between job listings and unemployment rate, this would suggest unemployment rate will further increase to ~21% by the end of Month of May. Up till now this means a 10.1% decrease in listed job openings.

Information Technology – eg. software & services, computer hardware, IT services …

Similar trends are seen for the Consumer Discretionary and Industrials industries as seen from below two graphs.

Consumer Discretionary – non essential goods eg. leisure products, entertainment, sporting, restaurants …

Industrials – finished products that can be used for construction and manufacturing industry

Covid19 definitely has a big impact on Hiring Intent.

If you’d like to get more detailed data on anything Hiring related please check out our APIs at https://docs.predictleads.com or contact us at founders@predictleads.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Roq

Introducing Key Customer Data

April 16, 2020 / Roq X

PredictLeads now provides four main datasets. News Events, Hiring Intent, Technologies and Key Customer data.

Key Customer data is our newest addition. As the name implies it provides key customer data for a given company. Eg. who are their customers, partners, sponsors, vendors, investors etc. We’re able to get this data by searching through news articles, blogs, case-studies pages, testimonials, “Our customer” sections and more.

We go as far as to use image recognition to connect a logo on a given website to a domain name it belongs to.

Key Customer data is served via clean APIs, with same structure as our other three endpoints. We follow best practices from jsonapi.org.

Besides using APIs data can also be provided via Flat Files or Webhooks.

If you’re interested in checking it out simply sign up here: https://predictleads.com/sign_up and you’ll find an API key in the settings.

Documentation for the Key Customer data can be found here: https://predictleads.com/docs/#connections

For more details please reach out to founders@predictleads.com and we’ll be happy to help!

Cheers, Roq

Native Salesforce App

August 31, 2019 / Roq X

We’re excited to share we’ve started working on a much requested native Salesforce app and plan to launch it on Saleforce AppExchange in November 2019.

It will include enriching your target accounts with Job Openings data, News Events data, Technologies data and Business Connections (partners, clients, vendors …).

It will include functionality our Discovery endpoint provides. It will allow you to perform searches like:

show me all the companies that use Slack and have signed Inc. 5000 clients in the past month
show companies that are hiring for Marketing and are already working with one of our clients
show companies that launched mobile apps and received funding in the past year
show companies that will expand offices to Tampa, Florida in 2020

Above questions are just some of the questions we received from prospects who wanted to use our data but since they did not have engineers available who would integrate with our API endpoints the conversations stopped there.

As questions pilled up over the months and years we now decided it is finally time to start integrating with platforms like Salesforce AppExchange. Soon other platforms will follow.

If you’re interested in knowing more or are wondering if we can help you answer your business questions please contact us at founders@predictleads.com.

Finding Top performing Companies

October 1, 2018 / Roq X

We’re working with many data driven teams – VCs, Corporate VCs, sales professionals and innovation departments.

Our aim is to provide data that helps them:

enrich known companies -> to enable scoring and prioritization.
discover up and coming challengers -> to not miss out on new market trends.

For the #1: goal is to find data that is indicative of a company performance. Currently we track and provide data on Hiring Intent, Events from news, Business Connections and Technographics. Each dataset covers a wide variety of data points and is available via clean APIs – https://predictleads.com/docs/enrich.

For the #2: goal is to find new up and coming challengers. These are companies that we’re seeing for the first time having expansion signals. For example hiring via Hacker News, expanding Offices, receiving Awards, signing new high value clients … and many more. You can find them under Discover endpoints: https://predictleads.com/docs/#discover.

We’re working extensively on increasing our match rates and having historic capabilities. Currently we track over 17 million companies and have performance data from 2015 onwards.

Often our clients try to find indicators of how well a company will be doing in the future. This is no easy task. One needs to first have accurate and complete data and secondly enough historic data points to make any kind of projections. The game is especially patience ridden for data driven VCs and CVCs. Startups easily need 5+ years to become successful and/or make an exit. So this is the timeframe data driven companies are bound to – to validate their prediction models. Which is quite a long wait time to train the models and iterate. Now one could train the models on past company trajectories and past exists. But often not all data points are available to do that.

So it is a long haul game we’re playing here. And the name of the game is patience. But since history has proved time and again that subjects with more knowledge, data and insight perform better than those with less we’re confident the results will be worth the efforts we’re putting in now.

If you’re interested into how we could provide value to your organization please contact us via one of the contact forms here https://predictleads.com.

Looking forward! Roq

PredictLeads Top 10 teams StartupBootcamp

PredictLeads selected as one of top 10 Teams to participate in StartupBootcamp 18′ program!

January 29, 2018 / Roq X

PredictLeads joins Startupbootcamp Commerce, the leading global startup accelerator based in Netherlands. We will take part in its 2018 program in Amsterdam along with 9 other international startups.

We were first selected as one of the top twenty companies out of 600+ that applied. We attended Final Startupbootcamp Selection Days on 16th and 17th of January. Went through a vigorous screening and evaluation process in front of over a hundred mentors and partners at Startupbootcamp and were finally selected as one of the top 10 teams!

PredictLeads will now go through an intense 3-month acceleration program of workshops, one-to-one sessions and events in Amsterdam, starting off on 19th of February and ending with the Demo Day in front of hundreds of startup and tech influencers, mentors, partners, and investors on 17th of May 2018. They will be mentored by a network of entrepreneurs, top executives, and investors, and will have access to leading commerce companies in the Netherlands to validate and scale further. We will receive free office space, €15K seed money and support from Startupbootcamp partners, such as Amazon, Cisco, Ahold Delhaize, PwC, America Today and Rabobank, as well as over €500.000 in partners service and access to a network of Angels and VCs internationally for potential further investment opportunities.

We’re really excited to be given this opportunity. During the 3 month program our main goal is to use immense SBC business network to find new clients. We’ll be focusing on B2B companies that leverage Company Intelligence data in their products or services. We want to establish ourselves as the market leader in providing actionable Company Intelligence data to other vendors. Let’s do this!

About Startupbootcamp

Founded in 2010, Startupbootcamp is an award-winning global network of industry-focused accelerator programs. With 20+ programs in Europe, Asia, North & South America, MENA & Africa, selected startups gain access to the most relevant mentors, partners, and investors in their industry.

Leveraging Hiring Intent

October 11, 2017 / Roq X

When companies are hiring for categories such as Marketing, Sales, Financing … companies are normally in good shape to invest in new solutions that would aid them in these areas. So if you’re trying to find a segment of companies that would fit your product? Don’t overlook the hiring intent data!

Hiring intent indicates first off if a company is in good shape and in buying mode. If they are hiring for many positions this is a good sign they are in position to spend money. Specific job titles / job categories indicate what kind of area they are currently investing in. Are they hiring for SDRs, HR managers, iOS developers, Support agents … ? Each of these indicate they might be in need of a new HR system, TalkDesk software, offshore dev, Sales enablement software, Marketing analytics system …

Inside a job description one can also find expertise companies are searching for like: Content Marketing, Lead Nurturing, eCommerce Dev, …

Job openings also include information about what kind of techniques a company is exercising. For example on could find keywords such as: Kanban, Scrum, Metrics Driven, Customer Success, Social Media, Sales Prospecting … and can help identify more forward thinking prospects that are more open to new solutions.

Inevitably job openings also include location. So if you would analyze a large company with many subsidiaries one could identify which regions they are currently investing in. Do they have 27 jobs open for an office in Hong Kong and 1 position open in France? Are they hiring for 12 SDRs in Utah and have 5 jobs open in New York -> this can help focus your efforts to promote your solution to the right subsidiary.

One of the good indicators is also job type. Is company offering Full-time, Part-time job or a Remote job possibility? For example your solution provides outsourced blog writing. Companies searching for part-time blog writers with a possibility of a remote work should prove to be a great fit. Thanks to job opening data you are able to figure this out and spend more time with highly qualified prospects.

You can combine hiring intent with other technographic data ie.: find companies using SalesForce, HubSpot, Tableau, AutoCad … & at the same time hiring for Marketing. These combinations can prove to be really powerful & help you pin point the target segment with laser like accuracy.

Happy selling!

Cheers, Roq

Segment leads via different data sets

February 7, 2017 / Roq X

We’re proud to announce our newly developed system for uncovering and segmenting leads. You can take advantage of the following segments to create perfectly tailored lead lists.

Segment by companies that are:

hiring for specific talent (dev, marketing, sales, …)
use specific products: Saleforce, Oracle, SAP …
Companies that promote different forward-thinking methodologies: agile development, data driven development, are into content marketing, customer success, prospecting …
experienced specific events recently: launched products, received funding, expanded offices, invested into assets, developed new apps, relocated headquarters, made leadership changes…
led by key contacts you want to target (CTO, CMO, co-founders …)

Lead list segmentation

Why is all this important? Because now you can generate much more personalised emails and unearth prospects through lead activities that were hard to automatically track before. We use natural language processing and machine learning to unearth the above found data. Data is nicely structured and you could go ahead and not just pick companies that had leadership changes, but only those that changed CTOs or you could define what kind of products companies you are targeting they have launched: mobile, web, payments …

Your picked audience will be super targeted and your messaging very tailored. Meaning you’ll send less spam and more emails to the companies that would truly benefit from using your product. Which sales should be all about. Selling to those companies that need your products most and thus saving everyone lots of time with badly targeted leads.

As Max Altschuler points out in his book Hacking Sales you can segment companies or lead lists by criteria such as firmographic data (location, num of employees, revenue …) and with tools like Datanyze also segment these lists by technologies.

PredictLeads adds new dimension to this kind of segmentation. With tracking events found on blogs, news sites and job openings using sophisticated machine learning algorithms, we allow you to target companies on a very granular basis.

For sure you won’t be able to produce lead lists that are tens of thousands of prospects long. But this is exactly the point … These are your spear accounts as Jason Lemkin puts it. The leads of high value and big ROI. We don’t recommend adding them to fully automated drip campaigns but rather using supervised and tailored messaging to each of these accounts. The benefits will be well worth it.

Happy selling! 🙂

Roq

Company Signals API

October 9, 2016 / Miha S

We started PredictLeads with the mission to find actionable business data in public documents.

HISTORY

Categorized news articles about companies was our first offering, with which our partners were able to display highly relevant news to their customers. But quickly we saw even bigger demand for more structured business data.

The main issue was that there was no way to extract such data with our existing classification approach. For example, there was no way to know which company was acquired and which one did acquiring. Or, who was hired to which position within a company.

Although we knew the solution to the problem, we wanted to build something for the long term. Today, after 6 months of building systems, gathering training data and QA processes, we’re proud to finally launch Business Signals API.

FUTURE

At its core is PredictLeads Entity and Relationship Extraction System (PERES) which performs 3 steps:

It starts with scanning millions of public documents every day.
1. Public document examples: news articles, blog posts, SEC filings, job openings, PR releases, industry news etc.
System then extracts 20 different types of entities from the those documents.
1. Entity examples: organizations, persons, locations, money, job titles, business divisions etc.
At the last step, it tries to identify relevant relationships between these entities.
1. Relationship examples: acquisitions, personnel changes, investments, expansions, office closures, recognitions etc.

Well, actually, there’s a fourth step, human supervision. We know that machines are not yet fully reliable, so most of the relationships are still human approved for highest quality.

To get a better picture what types of data are we talking about, here are two examples of data in JSON format:

{
    "id":1656497,
    "type":"signal",
    "categories":[
      "launches"
    ],
    "title":"BMW launches ReachNow car-sharing service on Sep 19th 16'.",
    "body":"BMW will launch its ReachNow car-sharing service in Portland on Sept. 19, the car-maker announced today.",
    "domain":"bmw.com",       "url":"http://www.geekwire.com/2016/bmw-unveils-details-reachnow-car-sharing-launch-portland-next-month/",
    "found_at":"2016-08-15T02:00:00.000+02:00",
    "removed_at":null,
    "data":{
      "location":"Portland",
      "product":"ReachNow car-sharing service",
      "date":"2016-09-19T02:00:00.000+02:00",
      "organizations":[
        "bmw.com"
      ]
    }
  }

{
    "id":1915491,
    "type":"signal",
    "categories":[
      "invests_into_assets"
    ],
    "title":"Domino Printing Sciences Plc invests into assets : factory on Aug 18th 16'.",
    "body":"Cambridge-headquartered commercial inkjet printing business Domino Printing Sciences has opened its new £19m factory in China.",
    "domain":"domino-printing.com",
    "url":"http://www.insidermedia.com/insider/central-and-east/domino-printing-sciences-opens-chinese-factory",
    "found_at":"2016-08-18T09:44:26.000+02:00",
    "removed_at":null,
    "data":{
      "location":"China",
      "amount":"25332000",
      "assets":"factory",
      "date":"2016-08-18T09:44:26.000+02:00",
      "organizations":[
        "domino-printing.com"
      ]
    }
  }

Above are 2 of 30+ possible types of signals. Full list is available here: https://predictleads.com/docs/#signal

APPLICATIONS

Types of applications are (almost) endless, but I will list a few we had in mind:

Sales Enablement Solutions: empower customers to know everything about their prospects’ business without Googling around.
Predictive Lead Scoring: high quality buying signals should be core data for predictive models
Account Based Marketing or Sales: enable customers to generate automated highly personalized and relevant messages to their existing or potential customers.

sales@predictleads.com

8 Sales Triggers Stats That Will Make You a Believer

July 14, 2016 / Miha S

By now you have probably already heard of sales triggers or trigger event selling. Maybe you even went as far as setting up a Google Alerts system to track specific keywords or accounts. But do you actually use that information in conversations with your prospects or customers? As we’ve discovered from our interviews with customers and prospects the answer is “Probably not.”

In case you just need a little nudge, here are 8 stats that might help you take the next step .

But, before I get into details, let me tell you a story how InnoPath discovered the value of sales triggers by accident.

When InnoPath was just starting up, the founders were trying to match their algorithm with the right application. By talking with NEC, one of Japan’s then leading feature phone manufacturers, they found out the corporation is concerned about costly device recalls on account of several firmware malfunctions and bugs. That made InnoPath founders realize they could leverage their algorithm to build a solution which uncovers hidden firmware bugs. Demo with NEC went great and InnoPath’s first deal was signed.

Now that InnoPath figured out who their ideal customers are, they set up a system that tracks keywords revolving around firmware bugs appearing in news articles or forums. In the next 3 months they closed a number of major handset manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sharp.

Eventually, InnoPath achieved over 90% market share in Japan. Deals were closed within months at high-margin prices and competition couldn’t come close.

An inspiring success story.

Now, without further ado, here are the stats:

Prioritising your prospects by key trigger events lifts conversion rates. Companies where key trigger events occurred are 400% more likely to buy. (Source: B2BLeadBlog)
Connecting with companies that have recently received funding is a great first step to sales triggers adoption. Those who recently experienced a financial event and can now afford your services, are now up to 8x more likely to buy. (Source: SHIFT! By Craig Ellias)
Depending on industry and geography, the data suggests that a change in vendors is triggered by changing managers 28% of the time. (Source: PersistIQ)
Frustration with the existing vendor is one of the greatest motivators for change. Organizations recently dissatisfied with the status quo are up to 10x more likely to switch vendors. (Source: Craig Ellias)
Always be on the lookout for trigger events at target accounts and start a conversation with them before anyone else. Sales reps have a 74% chance of closing the deal, if they engage a prospect first in a consultative manner. (Source: DestinationCRM)
70% of customers want to talk to sales during the early stages in the buying process: when they’re information-grazing, when they first learn what you can do and when they put you on the shortlist. (Source: ITSMA)
You can close that event-triggered account, even though your solution wasn’t budgeted for at the beginning of the year. 80% of B2B purchases are unplanned and unbudgeted. (Source: DemandGen)
Segment your accounts by trigger events to gain a better conversion rate. Event-triggered campaigns will see their messages receive, at minimum, 5x the response rate of non-targeted push messages. (Source: Gartner)