Demandbase Buys Everybody? Revenue Waterfalls? Trump VS Social Media? | This Week In Sales

TOPICS: Demandbase buys InsideView and DemandMatrix, strengthening data services for B2B sales and marketing InsideView – firmographic data on sales leads and accounts to augment CRM or marketing solutions. Their services can augment data in areas like financials, employee counts, market segments, news, and corporate hierarchy. Demandmatrix – technographic data services, which provide data on hardware and software used by an account, as well as technology skill set trends and IT spend. https://www.demandbase.com/insideview-demandmatrix/ ZoomInfo CEO Schuck: Mining CRM’s ‘wasteland of information’ for insights CEO Schuck believes the company can correct the mess that resulted from a decade of investment in CRM systems. Following better-than-expected Q1 revenue and profit, and a raised outlook, ZoomInfo CEO and founder Henry Schuck spoke with ZDNet.  “When we talk to customers, they invested a lot in CRM a decade ago, and they opened the door to peoople putting information in, with no governnance, and it became this wasteland of information,” said Schuck.  “Sellers didn’t want to engage with CRM because there was nothing interesting coming out of it.” ZoomInfo plugs into CRM and “you can really turn CRM into a system of insight and away from a system of record.” The effort is as much about fixing what’s broken with CRM and other so-called systems of record of Salesforce and other vendors.  https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoominfo-ceo-schuck-mining-crms-wasteland-of-information-for-insights/ Forrester Debuts Next-Generation B2B Revenue Waterfall To Help Firms Accelerate Revenue Growth Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall adds renewal, cross-sell, and upsell opportunities as new opportunity types in the target opportunities stage. By evaluating conversion rates and costs for each opportunity type, B2B marketing and sales leaders can identify the optimal mix of opportunities, allocate resources, and plan and measure their performance accordingly. This year’s Forrester B2B Buying Study shows that more than 80% of purchases now involve complex buying scenarios. 95% of current purchases involve three or more people across two or more departments, and committee scenarios where strategic purchases include multiple people and departments across the organization and require executive oversight. Additionally, before COVID-19, fewer than a third of B2B marketers prioritized customer retention as a measure of marketing success. However, customer retention and expansion are perceived as more important to achieving business growth in tough economic times. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/forrester-debuts-next-generation-b2b-revenue-waterfall-to-help-firms-accelerate-revenue-growth-301282652.html Follow up from previous story – Why We Have A New Waterfall For 2021 (And Why You Should Care) Kerry Cunningham, VP, Principal Analyst – At Forrester, we are frequently asked to provide benchmark conversion rates for leads.