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.
The 451 Take
Context
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
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 SponsoredA 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
It can be difficult to measure and visualize appropriate KPIs for different
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
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
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
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 is a Research Associate at 451 Research. He graduated from Brown University with a BA in Biology and East Asian Studies and received
Aaron Sherrill is a Senior Analyst for 451 Research covering emerging trends, innovation