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Demandbase has found a $30 million believer in its B2B account-based marketing (ABM) platform.
Sageview Capital led a growth equity financing round for the 150-employee, San Francisco-based digital marketing provider, company officials announced today. Demandbase’s total funding climbs to more than $90 million.
"Demandbase impressed us with its leadership position in the expanding ABM category, blue chip enterprise customer list and best-in-class metrics in terms of growth and retention," Ned Gilhuly, founding partner of Sageview Capital, said in a statement. Sageview provides growth capital to companies with track records "of success and compelling market opportunity," it continued.
Accounts, Not People
ABM is a targeted approach versus “mass marketing.” B2B marketers zone in on accounts, because, as Demandbase officials told CMSWire at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in March, “accounts write the checks.”
Demandbase representatives said this approach focuses on quality over quantity. B2B marketers can identify the accounts they value most, and then market to them across the entire funnel.
Scott Vaughan, CMO of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Integrate, a digital marketing provider, told CMSWire today ABM is all the rage, for very good reason.
"While we are just at the beginning of this effort," Vaughan said, "it is an efficient strategy that allows marketers to identify and target specific companies. B2B marketers — as well as the marketing technology and media companies they work with — are assembling a war chest of data to make intelligent targeting decisions and more wisely invest their media and resources dollars in companies that are mostly like to buy their product or services."
He added that ABM and specifically, Demandbase, provides marketers with an ability "to use ‘signals’ to understand and proactively prioritize when a company may be in a specific purchase mode. It is a very smart strategy for B2B marketers."
B2B Marketing Cloud
Demandbase is a little more than a year removed from a major platform release — its B2B Marketing Cloud.
They call it the first subscription-based marketing platform that helps marketers target accounts, plan ad spending and tie acquisition costs for target accounts to revenue.
“In B2B, you have sales teams and salespeople, and they sell to companies,” Demandbase CEO Chris Golec told CMSWire upon the release.
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“In B2C, they sell to consumers and all web traffic is a potential customer. B2B requires a much more finite crowd. You’re selling to multiple people within a company. You’re trying to build influence across a company. The sales cycle is longer and the dollar value of transactions is much higher. And your website is a core part of your selling tool.”
Demandbase reps boast about their platform’s ability to connect hundreds of advertising exchanges, dozens of content management and marketing automation solutions with sales activity in CRM systems, at scale, for thousands of target accounts.
They told us Demandbase customers must contend with disparate technologies, and Demandbase helps them be more focused on B2B. Demandbase takes that disjointed tech and injects it with account-based marketing to help integrate it into the full B2B technology stack.
Money Plans
The company plans to use the investment to explore acquisition opportunities to “bolster its proprietary B2B data assets and real-time identification technology.”
"We already see customers spending 10X more on ABM than they spend on marketing automation tools, and the category will continue to explode over the next several years," Golec said. "The additional $30 million investment will allow us to capitalize on this market trend faster and commercialize several ground-breaking innovations in ABM to help keep our customers ahead of their competition."
In the first half of the calendar year, officials reported, Demandbase experienced revenue growth in excess of 80 percent, posted retention rates above 120 percent and secured multiple multi-billion dollar clients from the biotech, manufacturing, hi-tech and telecommunications industries.
Other investors to Demandbase in this funding round include Adobe Systems, Altos Ventures, Costanoa Venture Capital, Greenspring Associates, Salesforce.com Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Sigma West.
In April, Demandbase released its Demandbase Sales Accelerator on the Salesforce AppExchange. The Sales Accelerator tool pushes insights about client accounts and actions based on website and advertising traffic into the Salesforce1 Platform for better management and analysis.
