CDP Institute

Business software information company G2 has raised a $157 million Series D, bringing total funding to $257 million and valuation to $1.1 billion.  While best known for its crowd-sourced reviews, the company also helps companies buy and manage their software and offers marketing solutions to software sellers.

Not every business information story has a happy ending.  Crowd-sourced company data collector Owler was just bought by media-monitoring firm Meltwater for $24.5 million in cash and equity.  Owler had raised $30.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

I know you’ve already heard the news, but still feel obligated to report that Google has announced it will support third-party cookies in Chrome until the end of 2023, more than a year longer than expected.  They nobly cite concern for “the business models of many web publishers” but protecting their own revenue and data-gathering seems a more plausible motivation.  They’re also grounding FLoC, their much-criticized cohort-based targeting alternative, until further notice.

Small business marketing platform Constant Contact is buying marketing automation and CRM vendor Sharpspring for $240 million, or about 8x revenue. The deal will further expand Constant Contact’s offerings, which already include email, ecommerce, websites, and social media advertising. Sharpspring has specialized in selling through small marketing agencies.

Stockholm-based CDP Data Talks has raised $1.4 million for its first round of venture funding.  It may not seem like much but remember that Sweden is a small country and it’s more impressive if you describe it as 11.5 million Krona.

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services are expanding their alliance, making it easier for developers to share data, workflows, and services between Salesforce and AWS applications. A separate announcement described new low-code development features for the Salesforce Platform. It also preannounced some new privacy and identity management features, but let’s talk after until they’re actually released.

CDP Amperity also has a new partnership, with the Braze customer engagement platform.  The integration will make Amperity’s unified profiles more easily available to Braze personalization and journey orchestration programs.

Here’s a pair of sibling integrations. Sailthru and Liveclicker, both owned by CM Group, are connecting their systems so Sailthru campaigns can include product recommendations, timers, maps, and other cool Liveclicker features. Meanwhile, Phonexa is offering a suite that combines new click tracking, suppression list management, and cloud PBX products with its previously-separate call tracking, lead distribution, email and SMS marketing, and accounting systems.

I don’t have any real news today, Dear Reader, but can offer a bouquet of fine surveys.  This one by Corinium Global Intelligence for Precisely offers an exceptionally deep dive into business data issues, including differences in data use and prep time by region and industry.   Sadly, just 35% of people report they’d trust a data-driven insight that conflicts with their intuition, and only 13% of companies say most employees can access the data they need for themselves.

This HBR Analytics Services report for Google Cloud tells a similar tale: while 80% of respondents say it’s important to measure the outcomes of their data and analytics investments, just 26% say they’re extremely effective at it.  Leaders are more likely than others to prioritize integration, real time access, machine learning, and open architectures.

Finally, let’s look at organizational insights from a pair of CX surveys. Pointillist finds that high performers are twice as likely as under performers to have a dedicated journey management team, while Wpromote and Ascend2 report that best-in-class B2B digital marketers more often say that teams outside of marketing have a role in improving CX. Also interesting: just 16% of respondents do journey orchestration although 55% do mapping (Pointillist); 42% have no plans to deal with the loss of third-party cookies (Wpromote).

Headless communications may sound like your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving, but it actually refers to the hot market for systems that provide services through API connections, letting users build their own interface. Nylas has just raised a $120 million Series C for headless communications APIs such as calendars, scheduling, and notification emails.