B2B Lead Provider True Influence Opens Up Its Internal Service Through New Cloud-Based Platform

Since its founding in 2008, B2B lead generation provider True Influence has delivered info on specific individuals at targeted companies for such clients as Microsoft and Cisco.

Today, the Vienna, Virginia-based company announces a publicly available self-service version of what had been its internal service. Called InsightBASE, the cloud-based platform provides email addresses and other targeting info about individuals at specific companies, for use in email or display ad campaigns. The company claims its targeted data boosts email open and click-through rates to four times normal.

The idea is to reach potential leads as close as possible to the beginning of their buyers’ journey, preferably when they are just beginning their research. If they’re reached later, they might have made up their minds about their purchase choices.

The new platform employs a variety of data sources, including more than three billion monthly indications of buyer intent from such activities as visitors from corporate domains checking out topic-specific pages on business websites. A visitor from a hospital’s domain, for instance, might show her institution’s interest in new servers by visiting a web page describing that kind of hardware.

Here’s a screenshot showing a lineup of campaigns targeted at product or service categories:

Previously, CEO Brian Giese told me, client companies would submit demographic and company info to True Influence that they wanted to use as filters, and his company would deliver the lead data for use in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation tools or programmatic ad platforms.

With InsightBASE, he said, a client company can upload corporate domains they want monitored or search with keywords to create a list of targeted companies and individuals at those companies. The platform is scheduled for launch in January, at which time it will be integrated with Marketo, Salesforce, Oracle’s Eloqua and ad platforms for implementation of campaigns based on the targeted data.

“We get data, curate it and make it available to marketers,” Giese emphasized.

“We’re the gas station,” he noted. “The data is the oil, and the customer is the car.”

True Influence filters out target companies and specific individuals from the “oil” through a combination of intent data, information on the technology used by the potential lead and contact lists that it acquires, plus info on the companies. The result can be, say, a list of companies interested in cloud computing services, along with individuals at those companies.

A provider of B2B intent data such as Bombora is “like a crude oil supplier,” he noted, adding that they are part of True Influence’s supply chain.

He said this isn’t predictive lead scoring like what Lattice Engines and Mintigo offer, because InsightBASE doesn’t project the chances of whether a potential lead will turn into a customer. But while his company doesn’t do actual numerical scoring, the distinction is murky, since his company is, in effect, saying that these people are likely to become customers because of their interest in the product.

A difference from DemandBase’s account-based, management-focused lead generation and targeting, Giese said, is that DemandBase “looks at companies, [while] we look at individuals.”

Competitors also include such lead generation services as TechTarget, he said, but he added that True Influence’s data volume and filtering ability are the key differentiators.

“We have 30 million contact records embedded” in InsightBASE, he said, pointing to filters for highly detailed technology product lines, like specific IBM models in which potential corporate targets have indicated an interest.