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The Rise of Intent-Based B2B Marketing
Earlier today, 6Sense announced a $20MM round of funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. This is the story of why we invested.
When was the last time you went to a restaurant without checking Yelp (founded 2004)? Or booked a hotel without checking TripAdvisor (founded 2000)? Or bought something online without reading customer reviews (likely powered by BazaarVoice, founded 2005)? A generation of business decision-makers has grown up in that world. So why would B2B buyer behavior be any different?
“57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier.” – CEB
“67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.” – Sirius Decisions
We’ve all seen the incredible proliferation of marketing technology tools, with close to 1,900 vendors vying for CMO attention. But the vast majority of these are about instrumentation and optimization of the minority of the buyer journey – your own web site. What about the other two-thirds? That is probably the biggest unanswered question in B2B marketing and sales today.
Our search for transformative solutions to this problem led BCV to Amanda Kahlow, Viral Bajaria and the 6sense team. Their proprietary “Buyer Intent Network” captures time-based buyer behavioral data from thousands of sources (search engines, industry trade publications, blogs, forums, etc.). That means 6sense is the only predictive marketing and sales solution that sees the entire buyer journey.
What if marketing and sales leaders could detect when a specific buyer is truly in-market, ensuring hyper-focused engagement of the right accounts by a sales team and better customer experience for the prospect? 6sense users see 9X higher marketing-to-sales qualified lead conversions, with 2/3rd fewer sales touches to convert leads to opportunities. Think of the magnitude of that performance gain and what it represents in cost savings and sales productivity at enterprise scale. That’s why companies like Cisco, Dell, VMware, NetSuite, Lenovo and many others use 6sense.
From a technology back-end perspective, 6sense shares the deep data science and machine learning DNA of several other amazing SaaS companies in the Bain Capital Ventures family, including BloomReach, Gainsight, Clari and Captora. Within their respective categories, each of these products automates (a) the extraction of insight and (b) the injection of actionable to-dos into existing workflows (e.g., CRM systems). That combination is incredibly impactful for enterprise customers, as borne out by the growth rates of each of these companies.
Of course, great companies and technologies are forged by great people. Amanda (CEO) has an incredible personal story and is a true domain expert, having spent over a decade running a services business around cross-channel big data marketing tech infrastructure. Viral (CTO) was the architect behind the original Hadoop infrastructure at Hulu. Mark (CSO) was a co-founder at Bizo, which was recently acquired by LinkedIn. This is a seasoned, talented team and we feel fortunate to support them in their mission to transform B2B marketing and sales.
You can read the companies own post on the funding here: http://ow.ly/JkOUx
Big Data meets Marketing Again – this time in the world of “offline” CPG
This is a guest post by my colleague Ajay on why we invested in InfoScout. See how this startup is fundamentally disrupting the market research industry via mobile.
Today InfoScout announced the launch of their company and their analytics dashboard for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) marketers. Bain Capital Ventures, along with Founder Collective and Dunnhumby Ventures, led a $5M Series A funding round in the company. We are thrilled to be partnering with the InfoScout founders, Jared and Jon, along with the entire InfoScout team.
We’ve discussed in the past here and here the rise of Marketing as the next great function in enterprise technology. A new wave of startups is leveraging Big Data and cloud computing to deliver incredible power to CMOs, giving them access to real-time insights and helping them drive faster, more data-driven decisions. InfoScout is leading this trend in the CPG industry where the marketing challenge is even more acute since the CPG brands don’t’ have direct access to the customer data (this is owned by the retailers) and the customer purchases take…
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What’s Next After SaaS? Big Data Applications
This is a guest post by Ajay Agarwal, my colleague at Bain Capital Ventures, who was the Series A investor in BloomReach. That company has the kind of story that gets all of us excited to build great tech. Congrats to the team!
Today one of our portfolio companies, Bloomreach, announced a new funding round led by NEA and their partners Scott Sandell and Ravi Viswanathan. Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round. We are thrilled to work with NEA and welcome them to Bloomreach. I have known NEA for 17 years…their managing partner, Peter Barris, was on the board of Trilogy. Peter, Scott, Ravi and the entire partnership at NEA are world-class.
I had the good fortune of meeting Raj De Datta and Ashutosh Garg, the co-founders of Bloomreach, four years ago. At the time, it was the two of them and an idea. The founders wanted to solve the “content discovery” problem online and make sure that every web business in the world could be effectively “found” by their respective customers. Together, we at Bain Capital Ventures and the founders spoke to over 25 CMOs to validate this opportunity – the feedback was extremely strong and helped shape the initial product vision. We subsequently led the Series A funding in March of 2009, alongside a great group of strategic angel investors.
Less than four years later, Bloomreach employs 100 people and is on path to being the fastest growing SaaS company in history. They are one of the pioneers in the emerging Big Data Applications space: using data from inside and outside the enterprise to transform enterprise functions. Bloomreach uses techniques such as machine learning, web crawling, and search technology to mine a massive amount of data. That data drives marketing insights, new customer traffic and most importantly, new revenue. On average, BloomReach customers see 94% lift in non-branded, natural search traffic.
Unlike the last generation of SaaS and cloud marketing applications, Bloomreach is not a “form on top of a database” or a repository of manually entered data and workflow. These types of sales and marketing automation solutions are necessary and important, but fail to deliver real measurable business value and ROI to the enterprise. In contrast, Bloomreach and companies like it are helping web businesses large and small enjoy high margin revenue through an automated service and by doing so, are transforming the marketing function….which we believe is the next 10 Billion dollar opportunity in enterprise technology
Raj and Ashutosh have been outstanding founders and exemplary leaders. They have created a company and culture that is built to last. The last four years have been a fantastic journey. The opportunity for Bloomreach is awesome and we look forward to deploying the new funding in relentless pursuit of our vision.
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