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Join UpYourStack host Noah Berk, Co-CEO of Aptitude 8, every week as he chats with industry leaders and top app developers to help you optimize your HubSpot tech stack. Tune in for expert insights, tips, and recommendations to take your HubSpot experience to the next level!
Welcome to Up Your Stack podcast. I'm your host, Noah Burke. I'm also the cofounder of the OBO Group and Elite HubSpot Solutions Partner. Every week, we feature conversations with some of our favorite developers and app companies who either built their apps on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot, help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack. And today, I have Steven here with Dealfront to talk about what Dealfront is and what they do.
Speaker 1:So, Steven, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on there. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:I'll start off 2 ways. 1, what is deal front? And then 2, what's your role at deal front? Now you can reverse it on me and say, well, let me start my role and then get into deal front. So I'll let you kind of lead that portion.
Speaker 2:Maybe jump a little bit before dealfront. So dealfront is the follow on from the merger between Leadfeeder and EchoBot. So your audience might be more familiar with Leadfeeder, the website intelligence tool that was more globally known, before the merger, Ecobot, more locally known in in the European market due to the fact that they were the leading player within, data for the European markets. So Leadfeeder was started by Petka, Vincent, and Herk back in 2012. I started their kind of venture into website intelligence earlier with Snoopy and was a way of being able to bring website intelligence to the wider market.
Speaker 2:Was kind of actually built off following a lot of the examples from HubSpot. They wanted to start off with a freemium version, so they started off testing the market with a free version and then started to bring in paid in features and grew that way. So a lot of learnings came from Hub Spot and then also an integration with Hub Spot was one of the earlier plays, that they implemented, with Leadfeeder. But, if we jump back to the the merger a little bit, that actually Hackernood, just around the the pandemic. There was an introduction by actually a, a investment company, so called Great Hill Partners, who was lucky to get both Ecobart and Lead Treeder and thought they were actually better together so we had a better together story.
Speaker 2:The website intelligence piece aligned with the Deep Contact and Company, dataset, so aligning those 2 together. So after conversations, both with, Great Hill partners and, different sessions with the different well, what became the different teams, we finally got to a point of acknowledging. So about 2 years ago now, it's gone very quickly. So now we've got more rounded platforms. So we have the WebCheck Intelligence piece, formerly known as Lead Reader, and we have our sales intelligence solution, formerly known as EchoBot.
Speaker 2:And what I do within the organization, I sit within our partnerships team, working with our strategic and technical partners, as well as our, agency partner program as well, which came from the lead for the side and has continued to grow into different.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And and so tell me a little bit more. What what problems is deal front solving for these days? You know, you mentioned there's kinda 2 different markets and audiences. You have both marketing professionals.
Speaker 1:You also have sales professionals. I guess, who is this customer that you're targeting? Why are people essentially purchasing or or using Dealfront? And, yeah, let's kinda have that part portion of the conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Definitely. So we class ourselves as the go to market platform for Europe. So we're looking for companies that are looking to grow their sales and marketing presence within the European market. We're soon to be launching our US Data Pack, our website intelligence solution.
Speaker 2:It's still global, but it means that our b to b contact and company data set will have more of a global coverage. But the solution that we solve in the the two parts of the solution, we start with the the website intelligence pieces, letting marketing understand which companies are visiting the website, what channels they've come from, where they're spending time on-site, what intent they may have so that they can understand which campaigns are working, where should we be spending time, what content is really relating with our ICP, and then really powering the sales team as well to understand, you know, where should I be spending my time, which prospects are the hottest, you know, which prospects have I maybe forgotten about, and then on the site and looking at this piece of in information that I can then go back to them with and and help them from there. And then also on the data side of things, empowering you to understand what your total addressable market is, how do you build lookalike audiences so that you can start to to go after and and target on platforms, help them keep your data, in the CRM of today as well, with a product that
Speaker 1:you
Speaker 2:call data care. So really just empowering sales and marketing within the data that they need to be able to make light work over their day to day.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And so, I mean, obviously, all that's really valuable for both sales and marketing teams. And what would you say are some of the key reasons deal front, obviously, lead feeder, gained traction over the years? Like, what was it that kinda drew those audiences and customers to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the things that we always hear from our prospects and customers is ease of use, within the platform. We've always had seamless integrations with the likes of of HubSpot, which is, obviously, has been really powerful. We've always put data at the forefront and as part of that compliance. So one of the big things within the data space is making sure that we meet regulations in the correct markets.
Speaker 2:So we've gone done the arduous work of making sure that our data towers in the EU, we meet EU regulations. Our head office is actually based in Germany. And I think if you do pull it off in Germany, you can do it anywhere. So, that it's testaments to our hard work and I
Speaker 1:I think one thing that you really said there is and even you go to the website, it positions around it really is the data website intelligence company for the European marketplace and I guess describe to me a little bit reason why that's such a strong important positioning versus more generic? Like, what what makes the European market so unique?
Speaker 2:I think it's the nuances to the different parts of the market. If you look in the dark market, for instance, even when we kind of went through the merger, there's different formalities that I was never aware of and different ways of operating. And that's not just, I'd say, on the legislative side, but also in the way that companies in those regions do business. So that was something that we had to really address and and something that we've been able to help a lot of companies on our our sales team members have been able to use that experience to be able to help our customers enter into these given markets and make sure that they're doing it in the right way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I can imagine that's really important. So how do customers leverage deal for? We talked about the 2 different audiences. We talked about kind of your marketing, and we talked about sales, and you did mention something around alignment.
Speaker 1:But what are the actual benefits from using it? And maybe kind of talk about what have companies seen in terms of results from actually leveraging deal front in their operations?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So that's a great question. So from being able to implement, our website intelligence piece and starting to actually have inbound leads in the spot that, you know, people are aware of the solutions that they are providing and be able to actually start addressing people at different stages of the funnel and not just having to wait until someone fills in a form and can actually start to influence the sales cycle, and right the way through is something that we hear.
Speaker 1:Talk about that for a second because, I think a lot of the listeners in the audience are like, what do you mean you can actually identify the person visiting the website? You know, in a world like HubSpot, you first have to fill out the form on a website or click on a link that you sent them an email to be able to actually identify who that person is. But what's different about deal fraud's ability to do it? And and why are people interested specifically in that capability, which I know is huge, but I would love to hear from you.
Speaker 2:Definitely. So, that was built from the lead reader side of things. So back in 2012, we started off built on top of GA, actually initially. So we were able to identify companies using the API through that and our own proprietary database. And then overnight, that was turned off.
Speaker 2:But luckily, we could see it coming and replaced it with our own tracker. So we have an element of JavaScript that goes on the site, easily implemented through Google Tag Manager. Once that's in play, we're able to take the IP address, run that against our proprietary database, and then be able to show you which companies are visiting, what channel they came from so you can understand which channels are bringing in your Adele customer profiles, and then where they're spending time on-site as well and what they're engaging with, what content is working best. If they're watching videos as well, so video content. And if they do come in to sort of fill in a form, as you mentioned, then we're able to actually then do better attribution because we can see that they visited way before that form actually was submitted from, you know, direct source.
Speaker 2:A lot of us marketers hate to see when Correct. A lead comes through as direct source when we know there was potential engagements with the content that we've created in the past. So, yeah, that that's, one of the ways our tool really helps.
Speaker 1:And how does it work now in the age of COVID, or we should say I don't wanna say, well, it is post COVID from the lockdowns, but now a lot of people work from home. Like, how does it work to still be able to identify? You know, I I work from my home office 4 out of 5 days a week, and I'm in the office like I am today where we have this podcast studio. But how does it work, with all these individuals from home? How are you guys able to identify who they are?
Speaker 2:We have our our own mechanisms for being able to do that. It was something that we spotted a while even before kind of COVID hit as, we were remote first company at the time of of Leeds Reader. So I was working within the UK, but we're still being able to be identified by by our platform. We, yeah, have the mechanisms to be able to see it. And also a lot of people, even though they're working remotely, will still be connected to a company, network.
Speaker 2:Sure. Your ability is there, but we also do have mechanisms for things that fall outside of that as well.
Speaker 1:And and even though the merger happened, are the majority of individuals and and organizations who are obviously leveraging deal front, are they leveraging deal front from the standpoint of this Leveal type scenario where you're revealing who's visiting the website? Is that the common use case? But, I mean, just walk me through what are some other common use cases for leveraging you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That tends to be a really good starting point for a lot of organizations that come will start off with the website intelligence piece, start to understand which companies are visiting, where they're spending time, and then they'll start asking the question of, well, okay, now we understand which company is visiting. How can we get deep into the data and understand which contacts we should be reaching out to? What deeper data do you have around these organizations? What does that look like, and that's where we can move into our sales intelligence solution where we have a product called Target.
Speaker 2:Within Target, we have, 210,000,000 contacts, 40,000,000 companies. Hopefully, one of the team doesn't fact check me on that, but, I think that's where we were. As of today, when I was looking, and what that allows you to do is look deep into to that data. We have over a 100 different filter options so that you can start to really address, you know, who's your total addressable mark? Who's of interest to me to reach out to?
Speaker 2:We have a lookalike audience tooling within there, so that's powered then by AI as well. So we can do segments as part of that. So that's a really kind of light bulb moment when companies start to put their current customer base into that tooling and start to see these segments that they weren't even aware of. And and now the ones going, ah, these are why they became customers of ours because they're a part of this segment. We weren't really sure of how can we start to market towards this segment or how can we build an outreach strategy around that segment.
Speaker 2:So it's really cool to see how people move through the product. We also have our promote function as well, which is our programmatic display advertising tool, which sits inside of our web visitor subscription. So that's normally another stepping stone of when people start to see, okay, now we've got this traffic coming to the website, how can we either get them back, or how can we target companies and and show the top of the funnel, you know, show that. So that's really cool to see people explore.
Speaker 1:So you're getting more into what we would consider the ABM space, like the demand space demand base of the world where they're actually able to kinda start targeting it via ads, which I know is a really hot sector, which leads me to the next question. Who do you compete against And how do you differentiate? Because it's to me, you're you're kind of an ABM. You're in data and your website intelligence as, like, kind of 3 big areas. But I guess tell me, how do you differentiate from these competitors who are in the space?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. And, I think we were very lucky with, Greg Hill Partners who came in as part of the investment firm who were first invested in ZoomInfo. So a lot of kind of knowledge came, from that and steered the way we were gonna shape into the future. So I would say, like, ZoomInfo is definitely for the sales intelligence solution in Cognizant that, kind of sit within that space there as well. Apollo as well, from there, We look at the more website intelligence pieces, lead infos or lead transics that would sit within in that space.
Speaker 2:And then as you mentioned, Demandbase, as well. So they're all kind of competitors that we start to see, through the sales cycle. And I would say the reason how we come out on top in some of these cases is when companies are looking for that compliance. They're looking for that European data coverage. They're looking for a tool that they can grow through as well.
Speaker 2:So a grow tool where we're not just a web visitor identification tool, and they can't go anywhere after that, and they have to plug in something else. So we're starting to answer to these different use cases and, are able to, solve problems that a lot of our customers are seeing.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. And and, again, you bring up the European use case, which is huge, especially from a positioning standpoint. Number of clients we've heard say, hey, GDPR or the European markets or your servers are being stored or held. You know, so I I know that's a pretty common common thing.
Speaker 1:It's a really good interesting positioning. I think it's really important for all the listeners out there. If you do have a European branch or team or headquarters, deal phones probably should be top of your list to check out in these scenarios. And then what gaps do you fill in in the HubSpot ecosystem? Like, how do you plug in with HubSpot?
Speaker 1:What gaps do you fill in that ecosystem?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So HubSpot had their own kind of feature set. Quite a few it's been sunsetted now, I believe. So they had HubSpot prospect, which was a simplified version of our tooling, which would allow you to see which companies were visiting, but there was no kind of shelter auctions. You couldn't see the number of visits that were going on.
Speaker 2:You couldn't see what was the the level of intent. But it was a really good introduction into website intelligence, and that's where a lot of people were starting and then looking for additional features from there. So that's why we really came in and wanted to then bring our filters and being able to build out these different use cases, but be able to pass that data back inside of HubSpot so that you if you wanted to, you didn't have to have your sales team sat within our tool. You could have them go in, set up a list of shelters, be able to see what data was important to them, and then be able to push that back into the HubSpot ecosystem. So that would be done within the timeline, or you could create if there was a really good use case would be kind of net new leads.
Speaker 2:So you would set up a custom view within our platform, maybe looking at certain intent pages, companies within a certain region within a particular industry, and headcount. So that would be your filter set. And if everything matched that criteria, then you would create the new company with inside HubSpot and set up a task for the sales team to then look at that and maybe start an outreach strategy. So that was just a a simple use case of how and where are your customers would be using it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I can definitely see that as a pretty valuable use case, especially for net new leads to be able to go ahead and say, hey. Listen. These companies have visited our website multiple times. Check them out.
Speaker 1:Reach out to them. Do we need to be able to done? I think those are your highest likely, highest propensity clients actually do business with you, which is awesome. What's the future look like for Dealfront? And what does your future road map look like?
Speaker 1:And then the follow-up to that is how does AI fit into it?
Speaker 2:So, the future is, that we're going to, be expanding our sales intelligence solution into the US market. So our website intelligence solution has always been, global, but it's now great that we're actually gonna be able to serve our US customer.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, this has been fantastic, Steven. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, talking about deal front. Listeners, thank you for joining us. And that wraps it up.
Speaker 1:Again, Up Your Sacks, a weekly podcast featuring HubSpot app partners who either built their apps on HubSpot or integrate with HubSpot. And this show is sponsored by the OBO Group, again, Elite HubSpot Solutions Partner. If you're interested to learn more about or level up your own HubSpot, feel free to reach out to theobogroup.com. And, of course, welcome to find me on LinkedIn. Again, thanks for joining
Speaker 2:us.