Demandbase continues to acquire to build a new B2B Marketing Cloud

Demandbase announced two new acquisitions today that push the company beyond an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platform towards a next generation B2B Marketing Cloud - InsideView, a sales and marketing intelligence platform, and DemandMatrix, a provider of technographic data.

According to Gabe Rogol, CEO of Demandbase, the acquisitions of InsideView and DemandMatrix have been in the works for a while, and he sees the company as the first to bring all the pieces of the marketing cloud puzzle together.

Demandbase is aiming to move beyond Account-Based Marketing (or Account-Based Experiences (ABX) by pulling together all the assets needed to support a company's end-to-end sales and marketing strategies.

What does Demandbase look like now? There are four key components, aka clouds.

• ABX - which includes Engagio and aligns their go-to-market around the account
• Advertising - a standalone DSP (Demand Side Platform). 
• Sales Intelligence – this is InsideView, tracking activities across sales and marketing to help companies know who they should be reaching out to
• Data - the underlying data that powers everything and includes data from Demandbase, InsideView, and DemandMatrix.

A complete data cloud

The Data Cloud offers a comprehensive data set, including account identification and intent data from Demandbase, firmographics, and contacts from InsideView as well as technographic data from DemandMatrix. InsideView also brings a data validation/checking process that cleanses CRM data.

The technographic data from DemandMatrix is key for Demandbase. Rogol points out that a company's technology is fundamental to help identify right-fit target accounts. All the tech data providers were assessed and DemandMatrix was found to have the greatest weight in terms of its data science model.

DemandMatrix CEO Meetul Shah shared a few insights into the attribution model the company built. It looks at a number of things related to what's public about a company's technology, including things like the money spent on IT, the jobs they are hiring for, marketing collateral, and the next technology purchase plans.  Shah says the company has over ten years of historical data and leverages AI, machine learning, and a team of subject matter experts to build their models.

Supporting the entire sales function

Sales intelligence sits opposite ABX, focusing on helping salespeople connect with the right people in accounts. Rogol says that it is a separate solution that ties sales activity to marketing strategy, updating the CRM with intelligence and insights on a company and its people.

For his part, InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti talks about the need for a solution that supports pre-sales, sales, and post-sales (e.g., account managers). Companies continually change: hierarchies, company structures, change over time, and sales need a way to identify these changes to act accordingly. He also talked about the accuracy of public information and the need for solid data validation processes to ensure the information sales uses is correct.

Demandbase going forward

InsideView and DemandMatrix will continue to operate as standalone business units, but the data and intelligence these companies provide will drive the orchestration layer that is ABX, Advertising, and Sales Intelligence.

My take

It is a smart move to bring all these data together under a single platform. It's essentially a Customer Data Platform (CDP) without the CDP name (and some CDP capabilities), providing all the critical information sales and marketing need to find the right accounts and contacts within those accounts. The intelligence DemandMatrix brings on technology is key, as is the ability from InsideView to see when things are changing in a company.

I also like that Demandbase has broadened its offering from only account-based marketing to sales intelligence because the two groups are tightly aligned. These two solutions can operate separately, but bringing them together under the same umbrella with access to the same data is key to ensuring a company-wide focus on customer experience.