E-Commerce

Data Partners Team Up to Get ABM Right

data science analytics

Openprise on Wednesday announced new partnerships and a new service designed to streamline marketing automation and account-based marketing operations.

The newly announced third-party data partners for the Openprise Data Marketplace are Dun & Bradstreet, Oceanos, DiscoverOrg, KickFire, Acxiom, Cognism and People Data Labs. They join ZoomInfo, InsideView, Orb Intelligence and Synthio, which became members of the marketplace when it launched a year ago.

The new partners offer capabilities such as reverse-IP lookup, business-to-personal-email address lookup, business data in the UK, and more in-depth business-to-consumer and business-to-business data capabilities.

Meanwhile, Openprise’s new Multi-Vendor Enrichment Strategy Service lets marketers navigate the process of assessing data requirements, evaluating and selecting data providers, and onboarding data across multiple vendors.

Data Unification

The Openprise Data Marketplace accepts third-party data for solutions from Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

It uses Openprise’s connectors and business logic to simplify the process of onboarding, ingesting and normalizing data from multiple third-party providers into those solutions, said Openprise VP of Marketing Allen Pogorzelski.

“We can integrate with a variety of data sources, match the person, and standardize the data in a central place like Salesforce or Amazon RedShift to provide a 360 view of the customer,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

The Openprise Data Marketplace is part of the Openprise Data Orchestration Platform, a Software as a Service application that helps companies automate critical processes — such as data onboarding, cleansing and enrichment, data unification across systems, and data delivery — without any programming.

A unified customer experience “is impossible without unified data,” noted John Hurley, senior director of product marketing at Radius.

For data accuracy, “automate the cleansing, enrichment and flow of data through great integration,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “It’s the garbage-in, garbage-out paradigm.”

Companies first should determine their business objectives and data challenges, Hurley suggested. Then they should evaluate vendors with operations strengths in aggregation and data integration.

Sixty-three percent of 189 respondents to a survey Harvard Business Review conducted for Radius said data and analytics would be “very influential” on their B2B go-to-market activities within the next two years, according to a report released earlier this year.

Marketplace Benefits

Doing business with an Openprise Data Marketplace member company, Pogorzelski said, offers the following benefits:

  • One-stop shopping for all the third-party data needed for ABM and advanced segmentation;
  • The ability to simplify complex configurations on ingesting multiple providers’ data into marketing and sales databases, and to be up and running with new data providers in minutes, not days;
  • An easy way to designate primary, secondary and tertiary data providers to ensure they get what they need without repeatedly buying the same data;
  • Normalization of different third-party vendors’ field values to a company’s specifications. “Often data providers have different field values that mean the same thing,” Pogorzelski explained. “For the “job” subfunction, “Marcomm,” “PR/AR,” and “Communications” all represent the same thing.” Standardizing these values makes it easier to do segmentation and reporting; and
  • The ability to configure how companies want to ingest external data without having to turn to the IT department for help.

All data integrations are done in real time, Pogorzelski said.

Multi-Vendor Enrichment Strategy Service

Openprise’s new Multi-Vendor Enrichment Strategy Service offers the following capabilities:

  • Clean and normalize existing data in a company’s sales or marketing automation solution;
  • Assess match rates with data from a company’s current vendors and analyze unmatched accounts to determine data requirements;
  • Run comparisons of data from potential new providers to make quantitative data-based recommendations to maximize ROI;
  • Coordinate the ongoing process across data providers and normalize field values to a company’s unique standards using the Openprise Data Orchestration Platform, and;
  • Unify data across systems.

Solving Companies’ Major Marketing Challenges

Used together, the Openprise Data Marketplace and the Multi-Vendor Enrichment Strategy Service help companies solve two major challenges, said Openprise CEO Ed King:

  • Pulling multiple providers’ data into their marketing and sales system of record while maintaining a consistent set of standards, and
  • Seeing beyond vendors’ marketing claims and quantitatively identifying which providers are right for their unique requirements.

Companies increasingly have been using sales and marketing system automation software and integrating the two.

However, “sales and marketing system integration tracks customer engagement,” noted Cindy Zhou, chief marketing officer at Level Access.

“It isn’t focused on the early part of the sales process, which is identifying the right customers to target and prospect from the get-go,” she told the E-Commerce Times.

Organizations “have to first get all the right contacts at the target account to get account-based marketing right,” Zhou said. “Openprise’s Data Marketplace approach simplifies the process for marketers.”

Openprise serves pure B2B customers like Nutanix and AppDynamics; customers that are both B2B and B2C, like Box and Indeed; and pure B2C customer like Cord Blood Registry, Openprise’s Pogorzelski said.

Orchestrating Data

In the increasingly keen battle for customers, data orchestration has been becoming increasingly important.

Data orchestration “provides the raw source to improve relevancy” by enabling the fine-tuning of ads and marketing campaigns, observed Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

“Relevancy is the key factor for improving engagement and conversion rates,” he told the E-Commerce Times. Organizations “need to match first- and third-party data from multiple sources and a wide range of data points to improve segmentation and attribution.”

Openprise provides companies “more insight into users of an account or prospects that they can apply to determine the most relevant campaign,” Wang noted.

Data orchestration shouldn’t just be limited to ABM, he suggested.

“There’s a bigger opportunity in improving engagement and building a relationship” as businesses seek to further understand customers at scale through the use of artificial intelligence and real-time data intake, Wang pointed out. “We see a world of infinite ambient orchestration.”

Richard Adhikari

Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology. Email Richard.

1 Comment

  • And exactly how are they going to maintain the privacy rights of the people in the data, meeting all the requirements of GDPR? It is something such software should be able to manage – but only if they design it in from the beginning.

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