Open Password – Monday June 14, 2021
#934
Outsell – Demandbase – Modular Cloud Offering – LinkedIn – Dun & Bradstreet – ZoomInfo – Inside View – DemandMatrix – Engagio – ABX Cloud – Advertising Cloud – Sales Intelligence Cloud – Data Cloud – Company, Contact, and Personal Information – Bombora – 6sense – Customer Data Platform – MarTech – Salesforce – Adobe – Microsoft – Marketo – Modular Approach – Women’s Blogs – Ranking – Claudia Tödtmann – WiWo Management Blog – Aktuellkontor – Leisure, Fashion, Lifestyle – Josie loeves – Sarah Eichhorn – Christian Forum – Felizitas Küble – Stefanie Fiebrig – Foodblog – Michaela Lühr – Springer Nature – LYRASIS – UN Sustainability Goals
Cover Story: Key Demandbase Acquisitions Power New Modular Cloud Offering
II.
The most successful bloggers: Career beats cooking
III.
Springer Nature: Open access for research
according to UN sustainability goals
IV.
Oxford University Press: The End of Print
Outsell’s June Contribution
Key Demandbase Acquisitions Power
New Modular Cloud Offering
By Randy Giusto, VP & Lead Analyst
Randy Giusto
The deal creates a modular cloud offering with firmographic, demographic, technographic, and intent data at its base. This instantly makes Demandbase a key B2B data provider, next to LinkedIn, Dun & Bradstreet, and ZoomInfo, and positions it for future growth.
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What to Know and Why It Matters
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On May 4, 2021, Demandbase announced its acquisition of InsideView and DemandMatrix, creating a modular, cloud-based, B2B go-to-market suite that spans account-based experiences (ABX), advertising, sales intelligence, and B2B data. The move positions the company for future growth and comes after Demandbase’s 2020 acquisition of Engagio and its technology, which the company rolled into its ABX offering.
This new offering includes ABX Cloud and Advertising Cloud from Demandbase, and Sales Intelligence Cloud from InsideView. It also includes a new Data Cloud with intent data from Demandbase, company and contact data and data services from InsideView, and technographic data from DemandMatrix.
InsideView will become the brand and technology under the Sales Intelligence Cloud and Data Cloud while DemandMatrix becomes the technographics engine. Both companies’ CEOs will become general managers of their businesses in the new Demandbase organization. Terms of the all-stock deal were not revealed.
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Analyst Rating: Positive
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This deal, which came together within four months, gives all three companies higher multiples together than they had apart and creates a more solid path to a future IPO. It also consolidates share in the Company, Contact, and Personal Information space, with Demandbase rising to number eight. More importantly, the combined firm consolidates share behind LinkedIn, Dun & Bradstreet, and ZoomInfo.
Demandbase brings its strengths in website visit and account identification, ABM, intent data, and B2B advertising to the new organization. InsideView brings strengths in sales intelligence, B2B data, and data services, DemandMatrix brings expertise in technographics to the deal. Demandbase spent a lot of time and effort trying to develop its own technographics but, in the end, it became easier to buy than to build.
The new company’s modular G2M approach creates multiple entry points, so customers don’t have to lock themselves into a single platform, pay for features they won’t immediately need, or toss away existing tools and data relationships. They can move to whatever cloud they need next over time.
Through this modular approach, marketers can segment their spending across their ABM accounts and personalize their website experiences. They can see website visits and actual ad performance with intent signals, determine what’s working and what’s not, and course-correct their marketing efforts. They can then tie in sales intelligence to measure sales interactions and track account-level engagement with those same accounts; they can also attribute revenue back, essentially monitoring and measuring the buyer journey.
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Winners and Losers
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Demandbase creates a wider market opportunity for itself through this deal and gets a data platform it can build upon. Both InsideView and DemandMatrix come with their own licensing partners that compete with Demandbase, like Bombora in intent data and 6sense in ABM, which may cut off their API feeds at some point if that competition intensifies.
D&B and ZoomInfo will watch how this deal develops and monitor the traction that Demandbase gets. For now, neither owns a DSP, with most today purpose-built for B2C advertising (not B2B) and owned by either AdTech or MarTech companies. Still, the ability to segment B2B audiences, buy media placements, and watch it all play out across accounts is a powerful value proposition.
The missing piece here is a customer data platform. Demandbase doesn’t seem eager to get into CDPs or master data management (MDM), as most of its customers just want to manage their data in their Salesforce, Marketo, or Dynamics systems of record. Competitively, this leaves D&B with its B2B CDP and MDM offerings unless ZoomInfo decides to test both waters over time. D&B competes more directly with ZoomInfo with its new D&B Rev.Up platform, but will also go against Demandbase through its new D&B Rev.Up ABX module. It will want to keep Demandbase in its rearview mirror.
Another area to watch is the convergence between the Company, Contact, and Personal Information space and big MarTech. Demandbase doesn’t compete directly with Salesforce, which offers a CDP, or Adobe, which just rolled out its Real Time CDP, B2B Edition. However, D&B will now indirectly compete with both. Big MarTech vendors remain data-agnostic, but as they add more B2B workflow tools and capabilities, they start to overlap with B2B sales and marketing intelligence vendors.
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What’s Next
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The three companies making up the new Demandbase are connected through investors and partners, and the company needs to leverage these relationships for future growth. Salesforce invested in Demandbase and became an important partner for InsideView when it retired its Data.com business. DemandMatrix has a strong relationship with Microsoft, which also serves as its customer. InsideView has a robust partnership with Microsoft through Dynamics 360. Adobe is also an investor in Demandbase, and the latter’s CMO/CPO was a founding member of Marketo.
From a B2B perspective, there’s room for expansion now within Microsoft shops for ABX Cloud and Advertising Cloud, in Adobe environments for Sales Intelligence and Data Clouds, and in Salesforce users for Data Cloud.
The sales and marketing teams across all three companies will remain separate for the time being, but they will need to come together at some point to market and sell the whole solution, not just the parts. The company will also need to accelerate integrations between the underlying data, normalizing Demandbase, InsideView, and DemandMatrix data across the Data Cloud. It will also need to stitch together first- and third-party data across the three entities to make better sense of this data and work on identity resolution.
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Essential Actions
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This deal shows just how fast a multi-company and technology roll-up to increase scale can happen today. Information industry participants looking to create a similar opportunity ahead need to consider the following actions.
Provide Clarity Instead of Walled Gardens . The pandemic opened the eyes of CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs as their work shifted to 100% online. The move allowed them to see more of what was going on (and what wasn’t) with customers. It enabled them to measure more, identify gaps, and then plan ways to fill them. Customers today don’t have the time to rip out big investments in sales and marketing technology or sign up for extensive IT work to get their data houses in order — marketing budgets remain tight even as the economy improves. Customers need solutions that work with what they have, not new walled gardens that lock them into features they won’t use immediately. Consider a modular approach that provides stepping stones for customers to move to when they’re ready.
Look for White Spaces Between Partners . When considering a series of acquisitions, existing partnerships can often provide opportunity but may also create conflict. Map out prospects’ connections and identify which ones are partners but also customers. Assign not only a risk factor to each company considered but also an opportunity score. Forecast how various combinations of the companies might help fill in gaps from a customer and TAM perspective.
The most successful bloggers
Career beats cooking
(Faktenkontor) High impact, well-connected, eye-catching: No woman in Germany blogs more successfully than Wirtschaftswoche editor Claudia Tödtmann. With her WiWo management blog, for the first time a weblog from the “Career” topic area tops the ranking of the most influential German-language blogs by women in the Blogger Relevance Index. The analysis tool from the Hamburg communications consultancy Aktuellkontor continuously evaluates the performance of 2,000 blogs based on visibility, links, social media performance, activity and interaction with its community. In three previous evaluations since the end of 2017, blogs from the areas of “cooking” and “leisure/fashion/lifestyle” took the place at the top of the most successful blogs by women.
Nevertheless, both subject areas continue to play an important role in the female side of the blogosphere: at 27, more than one in two of the top 50 most successful blogs by women deal with topics in the area of “leisure / fashion / lifestyle”, led by “Josie loves” in seventh place. The experienced Josie blogger Sarah Eichhorn has been writing about fashion, beauty and travel here for more than ten years. Twelve of the top bloggers are all about cooking. “Herzelieb” is best placed here.
Michaela Lühr’s “Food Blog from the Far North” jumps from ninth place to third. Only one top 50 blog deals with religious topics – but it is particularly successful: The “Christian Forum” under Felizitas Küble puts the church in second place between the kitchen and corporations. Also represented only once, but right at the forefront: the topic of sports. Stefanie Fiebrig’s Berlin football blog, in fourth place, made it into the top five blogs by women for the third time in a row. https://www.faktenkontor.de/blogger-relevanzindex/ .
Springer Nature
OPEN Access for research
according to UN sustainability goals
(Springer) Springer Nature has signed its first sponsorship agreement for open access books with LYRASIS, a US non-profit association of libraries, archives and museums. The agreement just concluded provides for the publication of books on climate change, equality, peace and justice. Publishing as an open access title ensures that the latest research results on selected UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are freely available.
Springer Nature has a comprehensive UN Sustainable Development Goals publishing program, publishing relevant knowledge on the world’s most pressing challenges. Since the launch of the so-called SDGs in 2015, Springer Nature has published more than 300,000 important articles and book chapters that have been downloaded more than 750 million times. As a leading open access publisher (OA), Springer began publishing books open access in 2011. The open access book portfolio now includes over 1,400 titles from all scientific disciplines with more than 170 million downloaded chapters worldwide. Further research has shown that open access books are downloaded ten times more often and cited 2.4 times more often. This means that 61 percent more countries can be reached geographically than with conventional books. This new sponsorship partnership will help make scientific findings on pressing issues even more visible, circulate them and thus address them.
The new open access book titles will be published by Springer Nature under the Springer and Palgrave Macmillan brands under a CC BY 4.0 license. Readers can freely access the book content globally via the SpringerLink platform.
Oxford University Press
The end of print
(Outsell) Oxford University’s right to print books was first recognized in 1586, in a decree from the Star Chamber. But the centuries-old printing history of Oxford University Press will end this summer, after the publishing house announced the last vestige of its printing arm was closing. The closure of Oxuniprint will result in the loss of 20 jobs.
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