Summary

Terminus introduced a broad new platform for account-based marketing (ABM) that addresses some of the knotty problems businesses encounter when rolling out an ABM methodology across their sales and marketing teams. The platform brings sales more deeply into the process, which has been one of the sticking points in many deployments.

Terminus is pivoting from an emphasis on delivering advertising to targeted accounts to a broader stance that centralizes account data, along with the analytic resources needed to measure performance. The new Account-Based Platform builds out the functionality of its advertising module, and adds an Account Hub that visualizes all account data in one place (with role-based views).

The 451 Take

Evidence suggests that account-based marketing shows quantifiable results, but the path to a successful deployment of this targeted process can be rocky. Issues like internal communication, scattered data resources and difficulty measuring outcomes sometimes outweigh the benefits of an effective technology offering. Terminus' approach – to simplify the user environment and unify the tools into one hub – should make it considerably easier for buyers to get started with ABM, and incorporate it across their marketing and sales teams. Terminus is building a cockpit for ABM, one that is driven as much by requirements of sales teams as by the traditional marketing buyer. By acting as a central dashboard and data repository for relevant account information, Terminus is elevating ABM from a process to a more rigorous market segment.

Context

Terminus launched its ABM product portfolio in 2015, and has grown to about 200 employees and 600 customers, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Rosetta Stone and Pendo. The company is reported to have raised about $30m in funding, including a July 2018 series C round of $11m.

Early in 2018, it acquired BrightFunnel, located in San Francisco. BrightFunnel was an analytics vendor, offering tools that track account engagement and marketing attribution for pipeline and revenue across multiple channels and campaigns.

The acquisition was highly complementary with Terminus' existing offerings, and provided the foundation for melding account-based advertising with data gathering, display and analytics into an overall ABM suite. With larger competitors like Marketo entering the ABM market, and partners like Salesforce ramping up features that could compete directly with its own offering, Terminus needed to bring ABM measurement in-house.

Terminus had set about organizing the chaotic vendor landscape around ABM in 2016, with an effort to coordinate 35 vendors into a self-styled ABM Cloud for Salesforce – a do-it-yourself ecosystem of related vendors that provide different aspects of the ABM stack and plug into the Salesforce AppExchange. The impetus for this came from Terminus, rather than from Salesforce (which has its own separate ABM strategy). While Terminus ultimately pulled back from the effort, the attempt highlighted the need to centralize the ABM stack into a more organized offering that buyers better easily understand and justify.

BrightFunnel's expertise is in analytics for discerning the value of marketing spend and in advertising attribution. BrightFunnel was already a partner (and one of the vendors in the ABM Cloud for the Salesforce group). Adding BrightFunnel's technology helps Terminus articulate the revenue-based value proposition for ABM practices, especially to CMOs and other high-level executives looking for demonstrable ROI.

 

Products

Terminus' account-based advertising product has been its key offering to date. This application focused on the execution side of ABM – delivering digital ads to people identified as relevant or interested who work at target accounts. Terminus is enhancing it with connections to LinkedIn Sponsored Content, and making it part of a four-pronged offering that it is describing as the Terminus Account-Based Platform for Marketing and Sales. That's a mouthful, but it zeros in on some of the core challenges that people have had implementing ABM programs.

A recurrent theme emerging from conversations with Terminus' end-user customers at its recent FlipMyFunnel event was how hard it is to get an organization to align across sales and marketing to get ABM under way. People cite problems with communication across that divide, especially getting sales teams to buy into what is essentially a marketing-led initiative.

It can be difficult to measure and visualize appropriate KPIs for different users, and to collect all the relevant data in one place. Despite these challenges, account-based marketing can show excellent results across multiple important metrics, and fills a need for marketers that need a way to illustrate the influence that marketing efforts have on closed deals.

The vendor landscape, currently very fractured, is coalescing around a set of interlocked ecosystems that combine specialized point products with more general marketing automation platforms. There is an emerging consensus among vendors that buyers need to be able to connect their ABM tools into the broader systems that manage campaigns, orchestration, and often, the reporting layer. That's what Terminus is seeking to accomplish by rolling its advertising component together with three other modules that collectively form the Account-Based Platform.

One of those new modules is the Account Hub, a command center for account data usable by marketers or salespeople. It ingests first- and third-party data, and maps it from leads to accounts. The Account Hub is the master control panel for creating and segmenting target lists that are then executed on by sales teams.

The Account Hub is the focal point for pinpointing targets within accounts that are showing buying intent. It integrates with Bombora's data stream to measure what specific subjects target companies are researching, in near real time. In effect, Bombora can tell a marketer that there is genuine and specific interest in granular subjects, from a very identifiable segment of the business community. They call spikes of interest 'surges.' Having this inside the Account Hub is a first step toward consolidating multiple ABM point products into a single coherent structure serving the needs of the business user.

A third component of the Account-Based Platform is Sales Insights. This is an alerting tool that pushes relevant account information from the Account Hub directly into Salesforce, which is an important bridge between the way marketers and salespeople interact with account data.

Salespeople need their alerts to surface where they are the most actionable, and that's going to be in the program they work with every day, in this case Salesforce. Sales Insights lets them know that particular accounts are engaged with their brand and expressing intent, which allows the sales team to prioritize the leads that are most timely.

The fourth component of Terminus' Account-Based Platform is an Analytics module that includes an ABM Dashboard that translates activities across multiple roles into a cohesive picture of the impact that an ABM project has on revenue. Both the Hub and the Analytics components were enabled by technology acquired with BrightFunnel.

 

Competition

Terminus faces competition from the many point products in the ABM and extended B2B space, particularly Engagio, 6Sense and Mintigo. It also competes with multiple ABM point products, which are listed in our Marketing Technology Market Map.

Larger firms like Marketo and Salesforce have ABM elements in their portfolios. Terminus' platform, however, is more likely to be an ecosystem that fits snugly into those broader ecosystems. In time, it also makes Terminus either an attractive target for acquisition, or a potential buyer to fill gaps within its own platform.


Terminus SWOT Figure 1

Keith Dawson
Principal Analyst, Customer Experience & Commerce

Keith Dawson is a principal analyst in 451 Research's Customer Experience & Commerce practice, primarily covering marketing technology. Keith has been covering the intersection of communications and enterprise software for 25 years, mainly looking at how to influence and optimize the customer experience.

Jeremy Korn
Research Associate

Jeremy Korn is a Research Associate at 451 Research. He graduated from Brown University with a BA in Biology and East Asian Studies and received a MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he employed quantitative and qualitative methodologies to study the Chinese film industry.

Aaron Sherrill
Senior Analyst

Aaron Sherrill is a Senior Analyst for 451 Research covering emerging trends, innovation and disruption in the Managed Services and Managed Security Services sectors. Aaron has 20+ years of experience across several industries including serving in IT management for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Want to read more? Request a trial now.