The BI veteran has received an update in the form of a new Account Based Experience offering.
Dun & Bradstreet has been in business intelligence for about 90 years, and the D-U-N-S number, a unique identifier assigned to hundreds of millions of businesses worldwide, has been around for nearly 60 years. But it’s never too late for an upgrade, and last month the company launched D&B Rev.Up ABX, which it calls a “revtech” go-to-market platform.
Rev.Up ABX combines CDP with first- and third-party data activation and analytics capabilities, as well as partnerships with Bombora and Folloze; the former provides intent data based on a taxonomy of about 7,000 intent themes, while the latter lets you launch personalized experiences across channels. ABX, which stands for account based experience, is a term we’re seeing more and more often, although it hasn’t yet become a recognized category.
It’s a pretty significant change for a veteran BI vendor. We spoke with D&B COO Stacey Greiner to see if we’re overestimating the significance of the change.
The fragmented martech/salestech landscape. “Your impression is correct,” she confirmed. “It’s based on our historical strength and our clients’ trust in us for contact and account data. As we look at how we can continue to provide more value and be a better partner to our clients, the focus is on making it easier for teams to make data-driven decisions.”
It’s been a challenge for sales and marketing departments to access data and make decisions based on that data, she said, because the salesech and martech fields are fragmented. That’s why we’re taking a point of view about revenue technology, a unified movement toward a marketplace where sales and marketing collaborate on everything.” The Rev.Up ABX platform can be the foundation for all these hyper-fragmented tools so that you have one source of truth and you can activate a consistent buyer’s journey through all the tools that you use.”
At the heart of this is the recognition that B2B buyers are looking – now more than ever – for a digital buying experience. “You have all these little pockets of disparate data,” she says, “different teams using different tools. As a buyer, you expect a brand to have an effective, personalized journey through digital channels, but when all these teams and tools work in isolation, it can be very disjointed.”
CMO Network Summit: How the Rules of Political Engagement Have Changed for Brands in 2021
D&B acquired independent CDP Lattice Engines back in July 2019. It now forms the backbone of the Rev.Up offering. It takes first- and third-party data from D&B customers and lets you model audiences – contacts or accounts – that can then be syndicated into programmatic, paid search, paid social, email and sales channels.
Rev.Up, of course, recalls RevOps, a strategy for combining sales, marketing and often customer success management into one team. “When all of these teams work as one team, relying on one set of truths about accounts and contacts, whether customers or prospects, then teams can really deliver a personalized buying experience across all the different digital channels.”
Does the Rev.Up ABX platform offer anything to D&B customers who already have an ABM solution? “ABM is a movement that uses marketing and sales teams, but there are also movements that use all marketing and sales teams that are really more attribute-based – these are the types of companies and people that I want to do business with – and they use different activation tools to launch and manage those campaigns. Rev.Up ABX is one of the basics that allows you to leverage the technology investments made from an activation perspective, but still have all the data in one place to manage it in a coordinated way with all these tools.”
Why we care. The pendulum has swung away from point solutions to broader offerings that can orchestrate these critical digital journeys – but not necessarily to large, comprehensive CX packages. D&B’s Rev.Up ABX platform (and Demandbase began using the term “ABX” more recently) is more of a hub that can integrate existing activation solutions as well as aggregate data from a wide range of sources. And it’s in many ways a logical step for a business based on account and contact data.
