Field Guide

Field Guide
Contact Data Management 2015
Contact data management vendors
offer a range of services, including
data health checks, list
procurement, ongoing data
cleansing and appending, and
specialized research services
Contact data is increasingly robust
and accurate, drawing on social
media, direct phone verification,
user-contributed communities and
other sources
This report summarizes the
benefits of contact data
management and describes the
differentiators and challenges of 13
contact data management vendors
According to a recent SiriusDecisions study, 63 percent of b-to-b organizations
feel they can access, validate, transform and secure their current data. However,
only 13 percent are confident in their future ability to support an expanding
universe of data. In demand creation, as organizations’ desire to acquire more of
the right contacts (including key supplemental information) continues to grow,
their need for effective contact data management also increases.
Many traditional contact data vendors have moved beyond simply serving as
high-volume list providers to offer holistic solutions for supplying and
maintaining high-quality contact information. In this SiriusDecisions Field
Guide, we describe the benefits and core capabilities of contact data
management and provide guidance on how contact data vendors differentiate
themselves. The following vendors are covered: Avention, Data.com (part of
Salesforce.com), DiscoverOrg, Harte Hanks, InsideView, Leadspace, MeritDirect,
NetProspex (now part of Dun & Bradstreet), Oceanos, RainKing, ReachForce,
Social123 and ZoomInfo.
Definition and Benefits
Contact data management is the process by which organizations acquire,
maintain and leverage information about individuals they’ve identified as
targets for demand creation. The type of contact data that organizations seek
has expanded rapidly in the last few years. In addition to basic demographic
and firmagraphic information, organizations now frequently require personarelated data (e.g. a contact’s challenges, key initiatives and watering holes).
Similarly, the scope of data management continues to expand beyond quality
to incorporate data unification and ease of access. Effective data management
can provide the following benefits:
• Increased marketing effectiveness. Marketers can find the buyer personas
they’re targeting more easily, improving the efficiency of their demand
creation efforts. By addressing contacts’ specific needs, marketers can also
deliver higher-quality leads and realize an increase in conversion rates
throughout the Demand Waterfall®.
• Reduced costs. Best practice contact data management reduces spending
on contact acquisition and maintenance. A strategic approach to identifying
high-priority contacts to acquire based on an ideal profile is far more costeffective than the traditional “spray and pray” approach. As contacts’
information grows stale over time, an ongoing maintenance program ensures
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Field Guide
the organization has the most up-to-date data, eliminating the need to
repurchase data for the same contact.
• Better alignment between marketing and sales. Contact data
management strengthens the relationship between marketing and sales
by allowing marketing to deliver higher-quality leads with robust supporting
information. This builds trust between the teams and gives sales reps
complete, accurate information when they conduct their first live interaction
with the contact, resulting in a more effective conversation.
Services Description
While the vendors reviewed in this Field Guide have diverse capabilities,
SiriusDecisions evaluated them against a common set of data contact
management services. This is the primary set of operations that organizations
find useful when assessing the current state of their contacts, acquiring new
ones and creating a plan for maintaining contacts. Vendors reviewed in this
guide perform at least three of the following five services:
• Data health check. The vendor allows organizations to have their contacts
evaluated for completeness and accuracy. Service may include a white-space
analysis showing additional missing contacts for particular titles.
Vendor at a Glance: Avention
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 50 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 9 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 24 percent
$500MM – $1B: 17 percent
$1B-plus: 0 percent
Operations
Revenue: $51MM – $100MM Employees: 223
Customers: 3,200
Client Roster
Denali Group
GE Capital
Spectrum Corporate Finance
SunGard
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $4,000
• Contact acquisition. The vendor supplies contact names and related
information based on parameters supplied by the organization. In some
cases, a self-service portal may be available, while other vendors rely on
interactions with an account representative to work through list
requirements.
• Ongoing maintenance. The vendor has a process by which the organization
can receive updates for all or part of its contact database. This includes
cleansing data and appending missing information. The frequency with which
updates occur varies (e.g. real-time updates on Web forms, batch updates for
the database).
• Technology integration. The vendor can connect to an organization’s
marketing automation platform (MAP) or sales force automation (SFA) system
in order to apply additions or updates to the contact data.
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
• Specialized research projects. The vendor can perform research on a
specific set of contacts requested by the organization in order to ensure
information accuracy or provide additional data about the contact that is
not provided as part of the standard service.
100,000 contacts: $9,500
Avention
100,000 contacts: $9,500
500,000 contacts: $29,500
1M contacts: $44,500
25,000 contacts: $4,000
500,000 contacts: $29,500
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Avention is a strong choice for organizations that can articulate the attributes
of their target companies and personas and don’t want to be limited to
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traditional “checkbox” search parameters. The vendor’s proprietary search and
custom configuration tools draw from relevant publicly available data as well as
other sources to return rich information about contacts and their companies.
Avention uses APIs for connections into MAPs and SFA systems and can
schedule cleanse-and-append updates as frequently as needed. However,
organizations looking for deep detail in a specific functional area (e.g. IT
resources) may be better served by another tool.
Differentiators
Search. Although many vendors allow organizations to search for contacts
using traditional attributes (e.g. job level and function, company revenue,
industry, location), Avention also provides the ability to search unstructured
data with a more expansive dictionary. Its proprietary algorithm allows a search
to go beyond literal keyword match to scan the database of contact names as
well as unstructured data such as news feeds, analyst reports and SWOT
analyses in order to return the most relevant companies and contacts.
Vendor at a Glance: Data.com
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: Did not
disclose
$100MM – $250MM: Did not disclose
$250MM – $500MM: Did not disclose
Trigger events. Avention uses publicly available information to track
companies across a number of categories (e.g. layoffs, partnering activity, big
data, contract awards), assigning a percentile score for the organization in each
category. This tracking affords a great range of sensitivity analysis when
refining contact searches based on specific criteria.
Employees: 15,000*
Profile matching. Avention’s Ideal Profile Configurator allows organizations to
select the traits and characteristics of their best customers in order to perform
“look-alike” searches. With sliding scales, users can assign a relative level of
importance to each business signal when defining profiles. Multiple profiles can
be saved and edited.
*Salesforce.com total; vendor does not
Challenges
$500MM – $1B: Did not disclose
$1B-plus: Did not disclose
Operations
Revenue: $1B-plus*
Customers: 150,000*
break down numbers by product line
Client Roster
Brainshark
Field Nation
InterCall
Kelly Services
Source Media
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
Pricing per seat/per month ($25-$35),
which includes unlimited cleansing of
data within Salesforce.com
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
Pricing is per seat/per month ($125$165) and includes the first 300
contacts. Additional contacts are
purchased at $.50 to $.65 per contact,
with volume discounts.
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Lack of standalone health check. While Avention offers diagnostics as part of
its match-and-append services, a standalone offering for performing a health
check on an organization’s contact data is not available. Many organizations find
performing this health check useful as a first step to assessing their current data
completeness and accuracy before forming their improvement strategy.
MAP integration. While Avention offers native integration with SFA platforms
such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com, it does not yet offer similar
integrations with leading MAPs. Native MAP integration is quickly becoming the
de facto standard in the contact data management space.
Data.com
Data.com, a Salesforce.com offering, provides enterprises and small and
medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using Salesforce.com with a self-service
solution to find new account and contact data, conduct analysis on their data
health and clean existing data. Organizations that use Salesforce.com and have
high-volume data sourcing and maintenance needs may find the Data.com
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offering a good fit. However, because Data.com’s functionality is offered only
within the Salesforce.com platform, it cannot be used by organizations that
have implemented any other SFA platform.
Differentiators
Data volume. Data.com provides access to a global database of more than
23 million company profiles sourced from D&B (company information) and
Data.com Connect (contact information, including social media accounts).
These two sources are linked to provide a more comprehensive picture of
account contacts organized by level and department and inclusive of employee
counts, revenue and industry codes (SIC/NAICS). Account data is automatically
linked when matches are found and can also be added manually as needed.
Data.com offers multiple options to search for records for list building and
indicates any account and contact data that already exists within an
organization’s Salesforce.com database.
Contact data cleansing. Data.com supports a real-time data stewardship
model for data cleansing. Contact information provided through Data.com
Connect is continuously sourced, validated and updated by a community of 2
million members for cleanliness and accuracy. Users can compare their contact
records with Data.com information to update missing or out-of-date fields.
Changes to contact information are sent back to the community for validation.
Using the Data.com Clean product, organizations can cleanse data for a single
contact, a list of records or an entire data set. Database-wide cleansing is
scheduled using the Clean Jobs administrative functionality and managed
through configurable settings.
Product innovation. Data.com benefits from a committed investment from its
parent company. Its aggressive product roadmap is leading to new functionality
and partnerships, including a duplicate-contact management solution and
integration with the Salesforce.com Analytics Cloud for data and white-space
analysis.
Challenges
Salesforce.com-centricity. All of the data search, import, assessment, cleanse
and analysis functionality of Data.com is available only within Salesforce.com.
Because Data.com doesn’t integrate directly with MAPs, organizations must
extract the data from Salesforce.com to use it for marketing activities (via an
established data sync with the MAP, a direct transfer using an API or manual
export/import).
Specialty data sourcing. While Data.com provides users with a large set of
business data records, its data does not include specialty data sources (e.g.
vertical, geographic, buying center/role information). Organizations must use
Data.com Exchange partners for additional data sourcing. Partners include
Bisnode (European business data), Health Market Science (healthcare
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Field Guide
practitioner data) and S&P Capital IQ (financial data). Users also can contract
specialty data sourcing projects with the Data.com professional services team.
DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg provides organizations focused on selling in IT, marketing and
finance markets with an easier way to acquire information about buyers and
their specific needs. The tool is appropriate for organizations looking to get a
deeper understanding of contacts’ organizational structures, technology
installation and purchase cycles. Organizations that already subscribe to similar
services or are seeking only contact lists for one-time use may not benefit by
adding DiscoverOrg to their contact data mix.
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance:
DiscoverOrg
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 84 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 4 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 4 percent
$500MM – $1B: 3 percent
$1B-plus: 5 percent
Operations
Revenue: $26MM – $50MM
Employees: 135
Customers: 1,500
Organizational mapping. DiscoverOrg offers organizational charts on profiled
organizations, providing visibility into the hierarchical structure of targeted
buying centers and accounts. Data includes organizations’ existing technology
infrastructures, applications, identified needs and active buying processes. The
data links contacts to specific projects, and users can set up alerts (e.g. daily,
weekly, monthly) to be notified of any changes or additions to these
parameters.
SFA integration. DiscoverOrg offers data connectors that allow the direct
export and auto refresh of contact records into Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and
Microsoft Dynamics, checking for duplicates prior to import. Deeper integration
that allows contact and account searching, import, appending and cleansing, as
well as org charts that can be viewed in-line, is available within Salesforce.com.
Additionally, users can enable data elements to be automatically updated
through DiscoverOrg research that is pushed into Salesforce.com, eliminating
the need to export/import between the two platforms.
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
Data accuracy. DiscoverOrg guarantees 95 percent data accuracy. It employs 100
research analysts who perform custom data research and verify records for
20,000 companies and 400,000 contacts every 90 days. Nearly all (96 percent) of
contacts in the database include a direct-dial phone number, and email validation
is performed every 30 days through six methods to maximize accuracy. The
vendors says it made 80,000 contact changes to its database last year.
datasets.
Challenges
Client Roster
OpenText
Presidio
ProKarma
Uplogix
XTGlobal
Cleansing is included with purchased
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
Pricing is per data set per month (not
per contact or user). Pricing and
number of included contacts depend on
size of targeted organizations,
geography or type of contact (i.e.
finance, marketing). Ranges from $1,000
to $2,000 per month for 18,000-146,000
contacts.
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
European data. Unlike many of its competitors, DiscoverOrg obtains and
provides European company and contact data for its customers. However, this
line of business will be challenging to maintain as the European Union
strengthens and enforces its laws and regulations surrounding the use of
personal and corporate data for marketing and sales purposes. Additionally,
DiscoverOrg does not currently offer multilingual support services.
Buying center linking. DiscoverOrg’s organizational mapping and
technological and project insights provide data beyond simple contact
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Field Guide
information. However, the tool does not explicitly link contacts or groups of
contacts into a buying center or label individuals with buying roles (e.g. buyers,
influencers, decisionmakers, users). This capability would benefit customers
focusing on the b-to-b buying cycle, where multiple contacts are involved in a
single purchase.
Harte Hanks
Harte Hanks provides data acquisition, data management and data quality
solutions. Offerings are deployed in multiple ways, including point services,
multi-service delivery and complete database outsourcing. For organizations
with large databases, specialized data requirements, and multiple buyer
personas and product lines, Harte Hanks should be on the list of vendors to
evaluate. Smaller organizations and those with less complex requirements
may want to consider other vendors.
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance: Harte
Hanks
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 0 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 0 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 8 percent
$500MM – $1B: 15 percent
$1B-plus: 77 percent
Operations
Revenue: $501MM – $1B
Employees: 5,633
Customers: 1,238
Client Roster
Cisco
Xerox
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $15,000
100,000 contacts: $10,000
500,000 contacts: $20,000
1M contacts: $30,000
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts: $15,000
100,000 contacts: $45,000
500,000 contacts: $140,000
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Breadth of offerings. Harte Hanks provides four service offerings in its data
solutions practice: data quality assurance, database marketing services,
analytics services and data content. It offers access to more than 80 million
contacts, which can be used in conjunction with its proprietary GCDI Database;
data organization, cleansing, integration and enrichment services; data
intelligence into buyer behavior, purchase intent and content consumption;
and customer segmentation, predictive modeling, and digital and social
analytics. Harte Hanks also conducts primary research studies on behalf of its
clients. The vendor supports multiple data sources and client installed-base
technology (e.g. databases, MAPs, SFA systems). Harte Hanks also offers a
variety of additional services, ranging from marketing strategy
recommendations to creative services.
Focus on buyer profiles. Harte Hanks’ data approach is based on a thorough
understanding of buyer behavior and buyers’ purchase journeys. The tool first
builds ideal profiles of the client’s target buyers, using the Harte Hanks Ideal
Profile Methodology, based on four data attribute areas (core, extended,
behavioral and social). Harte Hanks then examines demographic and
firmagraphic data, buyer behavior and content/tactics consumed to determine
where buyers are in their journey – and where and why buyers engage with
sellers. Digital and social data is aggregated based on a business rule
framework to enrich the buyer profile, leveraging Harte Hanks’ Trillium data
quality software and its customer data integration (CDI) processes to create a
single customer view. Data analysis tests and refines profiles as they are
developed. Completed profiles are used to re-segment the information in a
client’s database and form the roadmap for future data acquisition and/or
remediation efforts.
Account-based data collection. Harte Hanks looks beyond contacts to also
collect and aggregate data at the account level. It monitors social media activity
for clients’ target accounts to determine account technology needs and track
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the information that targeted organizations’ leaders are following. The vendor
searches for client keywords and is also developing the capability to conduct
social media text mining for additional insights. This data is used to create
account profiles to allow marketing and sales organizations to inform their
account strategies. Currently, this capability is supported for accounts in the
United States, United Kingdom and Germany.
Challenges
Technology buyer focus. Harte Hanks leverages a wide variety of third-party
data sources, but its proprietary GCDI database focuses on technology buyer
accounts and contact information. The vendor works with external data
sources to support client requests for buyer information in vertical markets
(e.g. healthcare) as needed. Dedicated internal teams support data sourcing
projects.
Simple list purchase. In terms of data solutions, Harte Hanks customers
typically follow more of a total solution approach vs. a la carte selection. This
may not be the most appropriate fit for buyers looking for simple list
purchases.
InsideView
Operations
InsideView Open Platform is a good choice for b-to-b organizations looking for an
integrated solution to support marketing, sales and account management. It
combines data from thousands of sources to determine the best set of contact
attributes and offer insights based on contacts’ connections with each other.
Tight integrations with a variety of MAPs and SFA systems also make it easy for
marketers and sales reps to quickly locate the buyers and decisionmakers they’re
targeting for demand creation. For organizations looking for robust, ongoing bulk
cleansing services, however, InsideView may not be the best option.
Employees: 265
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance: InsideView
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 81 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 7 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 3 percent
$500MM – $1B: 3 percent
$1B-plus: 6 percent
Revenue: $26MM – $50MM
Customers: 19,000
Client Roster
Adecco USA
Avaya
Marketo
O’Neal Steel
Zuora
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $10,000
100,000 contacts: $28,000
500,000 contacts: $90,000
1M contacts: $150,000
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts: $10,000
100,000 contacts: $32,000
500,000 contacts: $100,000
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Multiple data sources. InsideView leverages more than 30,000 sources (both
structured and unstructured) for its account and contact data. Between 70
percent and 75 percent of its contact data records incorporate information
from more than one source. InsideView also limits its dependence on any given
source; no more than 15 percent of its contacts are from any one source. Using
multiple sources and an internal confidence score allows InsideView to provide
a best-of aggregation of contact data.
Data diagnostic tool. InsideView’s health check offers a free, real-time look at
the composition of organization’s contact data. The dashboards produced are
easy to absorb, breaking down the results in graphs and charts covering
essential information (e.g. data quality; profiles for industry, geography and
company size).
Connections. InsideView’s Connections feature creates a visualization of
contacts and their connections to one another. Organizations can build and
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Field Guide
share a private connection cloud that shows employee relationships, based
on information from social media, email contacts, work history, education and
existing customers. The connections then allow organizations to identify
relationships across the organization, which may help identify buying teams
and can facilitate referrals and warm introductions.
Challenges
Ongoing bulk cleansing. InsideView prioritizes solutions for ongoing cleanseand-append less than other vendors. Bulk cleansing activities are typically done
through the vendor’s data services team, often with files passed back and forth.
Although organizations can leverage the InsideView API to trigger the cleanse
from within their own systems, the majority of its customers take advantage of
cleansing services less frequently than those of other vendors.
Vendor at a Glance: Leadspace
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 15 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 10 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 15 percent
$500MM – $1B: 20 percent
$1B-plus: 40 percent
Operations
Revenue: $1M – $10MM
Employees: 45
Customers: 80
Research services. While InsideView’s data services team can help
organizations with custom searches via the InsideView platform, it is not
designed to conduct specialty research projects. Organizations that want to
investigate a particular set of contacts, contact attributes that would require
calling into target companies, or data sources apart from the standard inputs
to InsideView should consider other vendors.
Leadspace
With a focus on finding relevant contacts using unstructured data sources in
addition to traditional databases, Leadspace identifies and augments contacts
from Web and social media data. Organizations seeking contacts that have
taken a specific online or social interaction or require timely notification
regarding contact changes (e.g. role changes) should consider Leadspace.
However, other data vendors may be a better fit for organizations whose
target personas or companies are not active on social or Web properties
as well as organizations that are not seeking look-alike modeling or targeting.
Client Roster
Autodesk
BloomReach
Five9
Oracle
SAS
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $30,000 – $40,000
100,000 contacts: $100,000-plus
500,000 contacts: Customized pricing
based on client needs
1M contacts: Customized pricing based
on client needs
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts $30,000 – $40,000
100,000 contacts: $100,000
500,000 contacts: Customized pricing
based on client needs
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Differentiators
Web and social media data. While most data vendors source and augment
contacts with Web and social media data (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter),
Leadspace, in addition to sourcing contacts from traditional data sources,
conducts semantic analysis on the unstructured data at an individual level to
generate personal and company-level social signals.
Persona-based profiling. Leadspace helps organizations understand what
type of contacts they should target and purchase by building profiles that
match the organization’s products with buyer personas. Categories and
correlations between categories are uncovered through individual input
provided by the client’s marketing and sales users, as well as statistical analysis
of qualified leads and won opportunities. This profiling exercise provides
specifications of the contact, account and activity variables with the strongest
correlations to closed won business, helping to guide the organization to
purchase the best contacts based on a stack ranking.
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Field Guide
Predictive lead scoring. Separately from its data offering, Leadspace offers a
predictive lead scoring application (see the Field Guide “Predictive Lead Scoring
2014”). Given the interrelatedness between the purchase of new contacts and
the prioritization of leads for sales, it can be helpful for b-to-b organizations to
standardize on one vendor and scoring rubric to address both contact selection
and lead prioritization.
Challenges
Reliance on Web and social media data. Leadspace’s semantic search
technologies uncover and interpret unstructured data and query the Web in
real time for every user request. For organizations whose target audience
members do not maintain active social or Web properties, this approach may
not provide the same benefit of targeting contacts compared to those in more
socially active markets (e.g. high-tech).
Vendor at a Glance:
MeritDirect
Model development and integration. While Leadspace constructs models
and personas to help organizations understand what type of contacts they
should target and purchase, this process works best with and often requires
initial input from the sales and marketing organization, either through Excel
files, or within the Leadspace application. In addition, although data can be fed
directly to the Leadspace application from an organization’s MAP, entering a list
of names from Leadspace to the MAP requires downloading a .csv file or
sending the contacts to the MAP via an automated Salesforce.com integration.
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 10 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 5 percent
MeritDirect
Client Roster
MeritDirect’s offerings are especially well suited for large enterprises ($5B+
annual revenue) that need comprehensive marketing data and related services
to serve their global campaign needs. MeritDirect blends customer and
prospect data from multiple sources to provide a technology platform, data,
services and analysis that allow customers to plan, manage and execute their
marketing campaigns. MeritDirect’s full-service approach may not be an ideal
fit for organizations looking for a transactional, self-service approach to contact
data acquisition, cleansing and appending services.
Citrix
Differentiators
$250MM – $500MM: 5 percent
$500MM – $1B: 15 percent
$1B-plus: 65 percent
Operations
Revenue: $11MM – $25MM
Employees: 200
Customers: 1,000-plus
Blue Coat
Lenovo
Microsoft
SAP
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $7,500
100,000 contacts: $20,000
500,000 contacts: $75,000
1M contacts: $125,000
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts: $17,000
100,000 contacts: $52,000
500,000 contacts: $200,000
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Comprehensive approach. MeritDirect provides marketing data, planning and
consulting services to enable clients to acquire targeted data for their needs.
Services are fulfilled in part through the vendor’s Omni Solutions suite of
applications, which provides a technology environment that can meet the
needs of large organizations, and augmented by services to validate, cleanse
and extend data for complex segmentation and marketing efforts.
Data acquisition. MeritDirect’s partnerships with many data owners (e.g.
publishers, catalog providers, online merchants, industry-specific resources)
enable customers to specify data requirements that span multiple sources
of data.
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Field Guide
Global presence. As many competitors pull out of international markets (e.g.
Canada, Europe), MeritDirect continues to source its data globally. MeritDirect’s
data management services help its customers ensure that data sourcing,
management and usage are compliant with local regulations.
Challenges
One-off data services. Prospective buyers can simply purchase a contact list
or cleanse their current contact database without entering a full vendor
partnership. However, the holistic nature of MeritDirect’s solutions makes this
vendor a better fit for all-in engagements.
Vendor at a Glance:
NetProspex/Dun & Bradstreet
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 49 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 4 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 6 percent
$500MM – $1B: 8 percent
$1B-plus: 33 percent
Operations
Revenue: $11MM – $25MM
Employees: 127
Customers: 632
Client Roster
Birst
Domo
Eagle Creek Software Services
Kimberly-Clark
Rapid7
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $9,000 – $13,500*
100,000 contacts: $12,500 – $20,000*
500,000 contacts: $37,500 – $56,250*
1M contacts: $62,500 – $93,750*
*Ranges include standard and premium
subscriptions
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts: $15,000 – $23,000*
100,000 contacts: $40,000 – $55,000*
500,000 contacts: $150,000 – $200,000*
*Ranges include standard and premium
subscriptions
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Self-service portal. MeritDirect’s offers automated applications, but some
engagements still require manual intervention, which restricts customers’
ability to quickly turn around some short-duration projects and simple requests
with self-served data. To address this challenge, the vendor has developed
interfaces with leading SFA systems and MAPs. However, the complexity
involved with sourcing data across multiple partners can lead to lag time
between the initiation and completion of projects.
NetProspex/Dun & Bradstreet
NetProspex, which was acquired in January 2015 by Dun & Bradstreet, is a
contact and database services provider well suited for helping b-to-b
organizations acquire, enhance and maintain contact data. However,
organizations seeking database hosting options or detailed organizational
charts should consider other vendors.
Differentiators
Balancing coverage and quality. NetProspex draws its strength from the
breadth of its contact data, with nearly 50 million contact records in addition
to 240 million companies. Crowd-sourced records are supplemented by thirdparty records designed to fill any user submission gaps, and a structured
quality control process is applied to all database records.
Powerful freemium tools. NetProspex highlights its capabilities through a
generous freemium model, allowing potential buyers to subject their data to
evaluation and matching through its self-service online Workbench platform.
Users are provided a view into data health and a profile of their database.
NetProspex also indicates the user’s ability to append information to existing
database records and offers additional contact records similar to those housed
in the client’s database.
Continuous data management. NetProspex’s data-as-a-service option offers
clients a holistic (vs. transactional) approach to data management. Clients can
subscribe to continuous management for a particular segment of contacts or
their entire marketing database, and after an initial cleanse, any changes or
updates to data identified by NetProspex are pushed to clients.
10
Field Guide
Challenges
Recent acquisition. As with any acquisition, changes in management,
operating procedures and expectations produce a period of transition and
instability (perceived or real), which may affect product roadmaps and
customer service. While the Dun & Bradstreet acquisition bolsters NetProspex’s
long-term viability and breadth of data available, SiriusDecisions recommends
that prospective buyers carefully monitor any new developments and consider
them in their purchase decisions.
Limitations of bulk data. Like many bulk data providers, NetProspex battles
against the constantly changing nature of individual contact records. Some
degree of update lag is unavoidable, but data buyers often aren’t forgiving of
this reality. NetProspex continues to work to mitigate data accuracy risk with
guarantees, process assurances and innovative service models, in order to play
effective defense against increasingly demanding quality expectations.
Oceanos
<$100MM annual revenue: 35 percent
Traditionally a services-only business, Oceanos has recently launched an online
platform through which organizations can manage their contact data. The
addition has helped Oceanos evolve into a well-rounded player in the contact
data vendor space and a good choice for organizations with needs across the
various service areas covered in this guide. However, for organizations desiring
a more mature self-serve environment and the stability of a larger vendor,
Oceanos is not the strongest option.
$250MM – $500MM: 14 percent
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance: Oceanos
Customer Mix
$100MM – $250MM: 16 percent
$500MM – $1B: 9 percent
$1B-plus: 26 percent
Operations
Revenue: $1MM – $10MM
Employees: 11
Customers: 173
Client Roster
Autodesk
Citrix
Level 3 Communications
Schneider Electric
Plex
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $7,000
100,000 contacts: $25,000
500,000 contacts: $85,000
1M contacts: $120,000
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts: $23,750
100,000 contacts: $75,000
500,000 contacts: $250,000
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Contact gap analysis. After working with clients to determine the target audience
for a particular set of accounts, Oceanos offers a visual summary depicting the
contacts the organization has, the contacts Oceanos can source, and contacts that
can be obtained through a special project. This white-space analysis is useful for
comparing demand requirements to the total addressable market.
Contact valuation. To facilitate targeted contact acquisition, Oceanos can perform
a valuation on a set of contacts, enabling the organization to select, prioritize and
segment contacts. The process is akin to lead scoring in that attributes are
assigned a weight, and the algorithm scores and rank-orders the contacts. Selected
contacts are standardized and validated via a series of hygiene treatments.
Well-rounded capabilities. While Oceanos isn’t the top performer in any
individual service category, it performed relatively well across the board. The
vendor’s Data Optimization Cycle encompasses the core areas of service that
most organizations require, and its industry experience allows it to execute well
in each of these areas.
Challenges
Infrastructure. Oceanos is one of the smallest vendors in this guide – in both
employees and revenue – and although it emphasizes scaling capabilities
11
Field Guide
through technology and its clients’ use of its new portal, it cannot offer the
same level of infrastructure and stability as many of the other vendors in this
space.
New portal. Many vendors have offered a self-service platform for years, but
Oceanos has only recently created the Oceanos Cloud Portal. With a customer
base accustomed to a more hands-on vendor approach, driving adoption of the
new portal may prove challenging. Additionally, this will add new responsibilities
to the Oceanos team, and may affect its ability to keep pace with the R&D needed
to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving marketing technology landscape.
RainKing
$500MM – $1B: 15 percent
RainKing is suitable for organizations whose data needs include identifying
buying centers, current technology footprints, organizational charts and North
American/European contact data. RainKing is actively expanding its marketing
and sales contact database, but its data is still mostly focused on IT buyers,
making it less relevant for organizations looking to sell into other buying
centers (e.g. human resources). Additionally, organizations looking for database
hosting services or multilingual support would need to supplement RainKing’s
services with additional service providers.
Operations
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance: RainKing
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 30 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 15 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 20 percent
$1B-plus: 20 percent
Revenue: $25MM
Employees: 150
Customers: 1,000
Client Roster
Adobe
HP
IBM
MIcrosoft
Symantec
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
Data cleansing is included in
subscription prices and is not an
added/separate cost.
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
Pricing is based on the number of users
and the number of accounts (not
contacts) that the users have access to.
Pricing is flexible and can range from a
few thousand dollars to $1 million
depending on customer needs.
For example, a client accessing all
accounts/contacts with over $1B
revenue in North America and EMEA
with five users would pay an average of
$40,000 to $50,000 and have access to
6,500 accounts and 200,000 contacts.
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Verified decisionmaking roles. RainKing’s approach to conducting primary,
phone-based research allows it to create deep understanding of
decisionmaking authority for technology purchases. In contrast, b-to-b sellers
and marketers using traditional bulk data providers generally find that only a
pool of likely job titles is identified, and sales and marketing teams must
conduct significantly more qualification to decide whether they’re interacting
with the right individuals.
Researched technology footprints. RainKing provides a technology profile of
covered organizations, detailing key categories of software and hardware
currently in use. Profile information is verified via phone interviews, allowing
harder-to-detect technologies to be uncovered and providing a high level of
confidence. For organizations that build propensity-to-buy models around
technologies already in place, this information can significantly boost
identification efforts. For organizations without models built, RainKing can
perform look-alike modeling by evaluating an organization’s current customer
list, then identifying other companies within the database with similar
technology characteristics.
Append and suggest. Through a feature called Prospect Prism, RainKing allows
clients to upload a list of contacts and enhance that list with additional data
points (e.g. for not-yet-qualified individuals at a trade show who supply only a
limited amount of contact information). RainKing can enhance those contact
records and then, as appropriate, suggest other individuals working at the
same organization who may be more appropriate buyers for a specific solution.
12
Field Guide
Challenges
Buyer coverage gaps. Historically focused on IT buyer contact data, RainKing
has made recent strides in building its coverage of non-IT decisionmakers,
especially marketing decisionmakers. However, its data on these buyers does
not yet have the breadth that other data vendors offer.
Vendor at a Glance: ReachForce
Limited account scope. The high-touch nature of RainKing’s data acquisition
approach results in a high degree of depth across a limited number of
accounts. While organizations targeting the largest buyers of technology will
find RainKing a valuable offering, those targeting smaller organizations should
not expect RainKing’s coverage to match their market focus.
ReachForce
Employees: 30
ReachForce is suitable for organizations that require contact acquisition,
continuous database profiling and cleanup, inbound forms completion, and
data cleansing and appending. Additionally, organizations that need predictive
lead scoring and a partner to help with a customized data management
strategy should consider ReachForce. Organizations that are looking for only
contact data acquisition – or have a strong business need or desire for selfservice – may not benefit from ReachForce.
Client Roster
Differentiators
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 30 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 20 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 15 percent
$500MM – $1B: 15 percent
$1B-plus: 20 percent
Operations
Revenue: $1MM – $10MM
Customers: 100
CA Dassault Systèmes
GXS
Kapost
Marketo
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
Continuous Marketing Data
Management pricing starts at $15,000
per year for up to 40,000 contact
records. Pricing scales on the total
volume of records under continuous
management, cleansing and
enrichment. A subscription for 250,000
records averages $62,000 per year.
When cleansing is purchased with
SmartForms, discounts are available.
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
Contact acquisition is available as an
add-on for SmartForms and Continuous
Marketing Data Management
subscription customers. Average price is
$0.95 per contact. SmartForms pricing
starts at $6,000 per year, includes 3,000
registration lead form submissions and
scales based on volume. A subscription
for 10,000 lead forms averages $10,650
per year.
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
SmartForms. Unlike many competitors, ReachForce’s SmartForms offers data
appending in real-time through Web submission forms. SmartForms augments
lead form completions by auto-completing a small number of requested form
fields, then auto-appending many required company attributes (e.g. geography),
providing a complete record without requiring organizations to ask prospects for
more information. SmartForms can be integrated with an organization’s existing
Web forms and microsites and works with a majority of MAPs and SFA systems.
Data management. ReachForce is a first mover in taking a more holistic and
strategic approach to data management and unification across internal systems
(e.g. Web portals, MAPs, SFA platforms). Its continuous data management
solution uses database profiling to define gaps in completeness, standardization
and quality. Through ongoing data cleansing and appending (including address,
email and phone validation), it merges and synchronizes data from a customer’s
internal systems, providing consistent data across them.
Lead prioritization. ReachForce’s Predictive Marketing service – available as an
add-on service and provided by a third-party vendor – uses contact- and
account-level data analytics to provide customers with account ranking, contact
ranking and predictive lead scoring. This level of analysis of contact and
account data is rare in the contact data vendor space.
Challenges
Limited self-service. ReachForce provides a full range of contact data and data
management services, giving it some advantages over its competition.
13
Field Guide
However, its self-service options (offered via a portal) to perform tasks such as
list building, data health checks and validation, and appending of existing data,
and are not on par with the current industry standard.
Contact acquisition. ReachForce positions itself as a comprehensive data
management provider, and while it does still partner with a third-party contact
data provider for list acquisition services, it is de-emphasizing this service.
Downplaying contact list acquisition may hamper its ability to serve customers
and prospects looking for straightforward list purchases.
Social123
Social123 is suitable for marketing and sales teams seeking a self-service way
to obtain new contacts or enhance their existing contact databases with social
data. Companies with needs for customized research services or those whose
current contact data service vendor provides social data enhancement – may
not benefit from Social123.
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance: Social123
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 30 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 20 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 0 percent
$500MM – $1B: 40 percent
$1B-plus: 10 percent
Operations
Revenue: $1MM – $10MM
Employees: 20
Customers: 120
Client Roster
DemandMetric
DocuSign
ON24
Oracle
Rockwell Automation
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $4,000
100,000 contacts: $16,000
500,000 contacts: $80,000
1M contacts: $160,000
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
25,000 contacts: $15,000
100,000 contacts: $60,000
500,000 contacts: $300,000
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Social data. Social123’s database contains information on more than 225
million business professionals. Data is updated continuously and the entire
database is and is refreshed every three weeks. Using a proprietary technology,
the vendor collects social and Web sourced data on its contacts and distills this
information in 35+ fields of contact-level and company-level information for bto-b marketers. The full database is searchable and accessible to every
customer, and customers pay only for the contacts they download.
Compatibility. Social123’s offering is generally complementary to other
contact data services because it pulls social data that is not typically offered by
others (e.g. user group affiliations). Its a la carte pricing allows customers to
purchase just social data, email addresses or phone number and corporate
data. A data assurance plan allows customers to refresh any downloaded
contacts with up-to-date information anytime during a 12-month period.
Data lifecycle model. Social123’s ability to recover, enrich, validate and
originate b-to-b contacts allows customers to correct existing data inaccuracies,
enhance their data with fields found only on social media, check email
deliverability and risk (through tagging of contacts that are subject to anti-spam
laws based on geographic location) and discover new contacts. Social123 also
offers a complimentary data health analysis report that give users insights into
the health of their contact database and potential improvements.
Challenges
Custom research. While Social123 provides an easy-to-use self-service
interface, the company does not engage in more customized research projects
for clients (e.g. creating account hierarchies that include reporting structures
and buyer qualification for a designated target segment).
14
Field Guide
Reliance on social data. Social123’s strength lies in its capabilities for
gathering socially generated data. However, for organizations whose target
audience members do not maintain active social or Web properties, this
approach may not provide the same benefits in terms of targeting contacts
compared to organizations in more socially active markets (e.g. high-tech).
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo should be considered by organizations seeking a self-service data
solution with Web form auto-complete functionality and a range of other
services (e.g. analytics, de-duplication, health checks, bulk name purchases). It
is also suitable for organizations looking for contact data across a variety of
industries and/or to preview data prior to download and purchase.
Organizations in need of detailed information on technology installations or
organizational hierarchies may not benefit sufficiently from ZoomInfo’s
services.
Differentiators
Vendor at a Glance: ZoomInfo
Customer Mix
<$100MM annual revenue: 88 percent
$100MM – $250MM: 3 percent
$250MM – $500MM: 2 percent
$500MM – $1B: 2 percent
$1B-plus: 5 percent
Operations
Revenue: $11MM – $25MM
Employees: 100
Customers: 7,000
Client Roster
Act-On
Citrix
Concur
Dynatrace
Data sources. ZoomInfo uses a combination of Web crawling, communitysourced data and user updates for its database of more than 100 million contacts
across 10 million companies. Patented Web technology and natural-language
processing enable ZoomInfo to scan the Web and social media properties
continuously for updates and information on contacts. Its signature-block capture
technology, which is available for Outlook and Gmail, is offered free in the
Community Edition. A community of more than 300,000 users contributes timestamped information (e.g. name, title, direct dial number) automatically from
emails received. Along with user updates, these methods allow ZoomInfo to
refresh data on 1 million contacts and 55,000 companies each day.
Web form auto-complete. ZoomInfo provides integrations with marketing
automation vendor Marketo to auto-complete Web forms and automatically
synchronize data. A real-time analysis provides a confidence score and allows
marketers to view the data submitted via form against data in their contact
database for matching contacts. Users can set up rules to accept form data
automatically or manually accept/reject it or augment existing records directly
in Marketo.
Pricing Estimates – New Contacts
Personas. Users can create highly customized lists via ZoomInfo’s List Builder,
which allows users to upload suppression files, limit the number of contacts
returned from an account, and target specific accounts and titles in those
accounts. Persona building is enabled through List Builder and Insights to
provide real-time analytics on contacts in a customer’s databases and identify
prospects. Customers also can use this feature to find new contacts whose
characteristics most closely resemble those of their key personas.
100,000 contacts: $45,000
Challenges
WebEx
Pricing Estimates – Cleansing
25,000 contacts: $15,000
100,000 contacts: $45,000
500,000 contacts: $120,000
1M contacts: $200,000
25,000 contacts: $15,000
500,000 contacts: $120,000
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
Limited integrations. ZoomInfo provides an API and native integrations with
Marketo and Salesforce.com. Although it provides customers with API
15
Field Guide
capabilities for integrations, it does not provide customers with native
integrations into other MAPs and SFA systems.
Segmentation details. Although ZoomInfo can append basic contact
attributes, it does not currently provide details on buyers’ technology
installations or buying cycle patterns, although this feature is on its product
roadmap. Additionally, it does not provide the capability for the user to identify
buying centers within an organization.
The Sirius Decision
While it’s rare that a single contact data management vendor can fulfill all the
needs of an organization, the right combination can provide both the depth
and breadth of services required to effectively acquire and maintain data
related to the organization’s target audience. This report is intended to be a
starting point to help b-to-b organizations determine a short list of potential
vendors. We recommend first evaluating the organization’s current state of
contact data management practices and its usage of marketing and sales
technology, then assessing its needs in comparison to the capabilities provided
by each vendor. As the vendor selection process progresses, we also
recommend securing customer references as part of the due diligence process.
© SiriusDecisions. All Rights Protected and Reserved.
16
Field Guide
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SiriusDecisions is the leading global B2B research and advisory firm. We deliver the actionable intelligence,
transformative frameworks and expert guidance that equip executives to modernize and elevate sales, marketing
and product performance. SiriusDecisions is based in Wilton, CT with offices in London, Montreal, San Francisco and
Waltham, MA.
187 Danbury Road, Wilton, CT 06897
203.665.4000 fax 203.563.9260
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