The digital marketing world is getting a major makeover thanks to AI and big data. It’s like having a super-smart assistant who knows exactly what your customers want, sometimes even before they do.
AI’s not just about making tasks easier – it’s about making marketing smarter! Picture this: AI dives into job opening data and picks up on which industries are booming and what skills are in demand. This goldmine of info helps marketers craft campaigns that hit RIGHT WHERE THEY NEED TO.
The real magic of AI in marketing? Personalization. AI spots patterns in how users behave and what they like, so messages can be tailored just for them. No more spammy, one-size-fits-all ads. It’s all about sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Predictive analytics is another ace up AI’s sleeve. By looking at trends, like which job sectors are heating up, AI can predict where the market’s headed. This means businesses can adjust their strategies on the fly, staying ahead of the curve instead of playing catch-up.
But, it’s not all smooth sailing. With great data comes great responsibility. Issues like data privacy and ethical AI use are “kinda” big. Plus, the success of AI-driven marketing hinges on the data’s quality.
In a nutshell, as AI tech evolves, its role in marketing only gets juicier. It’s all about digging into data-driven insights and riding the wave of personalized marketing. But, it’s crucial to play it smart and ethical. Get it right, and AI won’t just be a tool >> it’ll be your competitive edge in nailing customer engagement.<<
At the World Economic Forum’s Growth Summit, economist Richard Baldwin made a great point: “AI won’t take your job IF YOU KNOW HOW TO USE IT.” Add some Good Data into the equation, and you’re golden. 🥇
Interested in seeing how PredictLeads’ Job Openings datasets can revolutionize your marketing and sales? We’d love to chat!
A HubSpot survey found that More than 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process and at least 50% of your prospects are not a good fit for what you sell.* This is super frustrating!
*https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-statistics
Outbound sales efforts are often tedious using up a lot of time and resources and often chasing the wrong types of prospects. CRM’s and sales platforms provide a lot of insights into a prospect but these are often irrelevant or out of date. The reason for this is that the data they utilize is not being updated often enough, only uses a couple of data sources or the platform doesn’t have the capability to drill down enough or overlap the insights.
That’s why data driven sales teams are turning to data to enrich companies and help them filter and prioritize leads. Not only do they continue to use platforms like Salesloft, Outreach.io, HubSpot, Clearbit etc but they are taking it a few steps further and enriching their prospects even more. This gives them competitive advantage which helps them to increase reply rates and meetings with prospects.
Identify companies hiring
Finding which companies are hiring is a great signal because it’s likely that they are investing in people and resources. Sales teams use hiring data in two ways. A) to find companies with the most live jobs regardless of the job type of job or b.) finding companies hiring for particular roles. In the second instance, companies hiring for marketing are more likely to buy marketing automation and companies hiring for accounting are more likely to buy financial software.
Identify companies hiring for C level executives
Finding companies who are hiring for C level executives means that sales teams are more than a few steps ahead. This is because when a director, manager or head of a department joins a company, it’s likely that they will implement new changes, evaluate tools and resources and be open to change. Sales teams who look for these signals early secure meetings and get ahead of the line before their competitors, making this tactic a no brainer.
Resonating with a prospect
“Hi John, I’m reaching out because … um … because …”. Sometimes finding a good prospect is easy but reaching out in a way that will grab the prospect’s attention is tiring, time consuming and frustrating. We all know that it’s important to resonate with a prospect so that they are more likely to open and read your email but finding that hook is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Data driven sales teams solve this by looking for newly available sales triggers like awards, new funding rounds, new partnerships, new integrations, hiring intent, companies they have in common with a prospect, latest acquisitions in their industry, new product offerings of their competitors etc. These are easy ways to create familiarity and show that you know something about their business.
Finding the Right Leads at Scale
Some sales reps cast their net too wide in an effort to attract as many prospects as possible and meet their quotas. Unfortunately, this often wastes time and creates low morale. Getting limited or no answers is frustrating and not a good feeling which ultimately reduces productivity.
To avoid this, it’s important to have the right data to quickly figure out which prospects to pursue. Having good data means a good lead list which means good quality emails, a high response rate and more meetings booked. More and more sales teams are using the help of growth experts or growth support teams to help them identify the right leads to keep on track. Growth teams then utilize data to gain sales triggers and build targeted lead lists which increases conversion rates.
PredictLeads data is one source of sales triggers, growth indicators and company intelligence which helps sales teams and sales platforms gain a competitive advantage. Datasets like Jobs, News Events, Technology, Key Customers/Connections, Products and Website Evolution are all being used to identify new opportunities and stay ahead of the game. These are available through API, Webhooks or Flat Files and can be accessed daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.
Contact mateja@predictleads.com to dive deeper into more ways that company intelligence data can help enhance your use case.
InReach Ventures uses technology to help scale venture capital and make investments in early stage startups throughout Europe. They built their own proprietary software and developed a new model of investing to discover and invest in the most promising startups.
There’s a few major data challenges VC’s often face including data quality and the time, effort and cost it takes to acquire or crawl data.
Here is a short interview with Ben Smith the Co-Founder / Partner / CTO of InReach Ventures and how PredictLeads company intelligence data helps InReach Ventures discover new companies and track growth signals for companies of interest.
How do you identify growing companies?
“InReach combines data from lots of different data sources. Some of that is around signals on how a company is performing like PredictLeads data, which helps us to find startups from all over Europe. This data, along with other types, allows us to look at how companies are growing, whether they’re growing their team, if they’re getting new customers or new business connections or partnering with different companies. “
Are there any specifics on how PredictLeads data is being used?
“With job postings in particular, outside the general idea that a company is growing positively, it gives us an idea whether there is real substance behind a company. Seeing that a company has a product and engineering DNA and are looking to invest more in it is a positive.”
What challenges were you able to overcome with PredictLeads data?
“It’s all about how best we leverage our own product and engineering resources. Having the InReach team focus on what we’re good at and working with partners that are better than us in areas is an important point of leverage.”
Why did you decide to subscribe to PredictLeads data?
“PredictLeads helped us by doing some of the work that we had always planned but never been able to prioritise. Finding news events around a particular company and identifying company customers through logos/connections is really interesting for us and also it’s something that takes significant time and effort to get right.”
What’s your view on the VC industry using data and what are the biggest challenges on the horizon in the industry?
“The value of data, machine learning and a data driven approach to capital is an ever growing trend. The point of venture capital is to fund innovation and how much innovation is happening in venture capital in the past 10 years is very limited. I think there is a change now where data and software is being seen as a way for venture firms to innovate their model. The issue that traditional VC firms first face is that culturally at their core, they are not a technology firm but a professional services organisation. Where we think we have an advantage is that we started as a technology, product and engineering organisation, taking a very data driven approach to venture capital. That’s where we think we will long term hold the advantage because we started doing this earlier. Traditional venture capital will start to utilise data over time, but at their core they are not tech or engineering organisations. Short term, data and tech will play a broader role in terms of the whole industry using it as it’s becoming more and more of a buzz and as data is becoming more demanded.”
What are some of the trends in Venture Capital?
“My co-founder and Investment Partner Roberto layed out the the data trend in VC well in his blog post: The Full Stack Venture Capitalist“
How do you see PredictLeads to help you achieve your long term goals?
“Two things PredictLeads does and will continue to do is that it helps us discover that a startup exists in the first place and then tells us whether there’s something interesting happening that we might want to talk to them about.”
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. Â
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.Â
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:Â 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.
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.
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.
