CDP Institute

CDP vendor Lytics has raised $14 million in Series B funding, bringing its total to $23.3 million. The funds will be used for product development, marketing, and sales.

Sales engagement vendor SalesLoft announced a $50 million Series C. Total raise is now $75 million. SalesLoft provides personalized email, phone dialing, and integration with CRM, collaboration, enhancement data, lead scoring, coaching, and content systems.

Since we’re on the topic of sales automation, let’s finish with news that “conversational marketing platform” Drift has added its own tool to help sales reps. Drift provides a chatbot, event-triggered personalized email sequences, and personalized Web site messages. If you’re keeping score, they’ve raised $47 million.

Sorry about yesterday’s newsletter. We don’t know who gave Jamie the password. Back to real news. Here’s a $16.5 million Series A funding from Nift, which helps local businesses help each other by providing customers of one business with gift cards for another near-by business. If you squint hard enough, you can see this as part of the trend towards rewarding customers directly for use of their data.

Hotel technology (bedtech?) vendor TravelClick has purchased Digital Alchemy, which specializes in email and text messaging for hotels. It’s interesting evidence against the idea that messaging is a pure commodity.

Here’s a sign of the times: publishing giant Meredith Corporation, which recently bought Time Inc., is selling its 450-person content marketing agency MXM to Accenture Interactive. Accenture is already among the largest marketing agencies; this just highlights its growth.

Hi, I’m Jamie, resident intern in the CDP Institute Department of the Obvious. The office is closed today so it’s up to me to put out the newsletter. Fortunately, I’ve accumulated lots of obvious research. Here’s a study from sales management software company Altify that finds companies with effective sales processes have bigger deals and shorter sales cycles. They also found that buyers trust independent experts more than the selling company’s CEO. Yep, that’s obvious.

Similarly, the International Institute for Analysis found that companies with better analytics have better financial performance, reputation, brand value, and innovation. This obvious conclusion is backed by a super-sophisticated methodology combining “quantitative surveys, organizational modeling, and a software-driven maturity scoring model”. The study was sponsored by collaborative data science platform Dataiku.

Consumer behavior is an especially rich source of obvious results. GlobalWebIndex tells us that 94% of internet users now own a smartphone, 16-24-year olds are the most active mobile users, and Android is the dominant operating system globally. Pew Research found that 26% of Americans are online almost constantly. My personal favorite is a HRC Retail Advisory report that 95% of consumers want to be left alone while shopping. These people make my job so easy. Obviously.

Facebook is phasing out its arrangement to let marketers target ads based on individual data from third party providers like Acxiom and Experian.

Data access is hot, so I’ll report on yet another scheme for consumers to sell their own data directly.

Worried you won’t be able to target individuals based on their data? Relax; that future isn’t here yet and, in fact, the options are growing. TiVo, whose cute little boxes quietly track TV viewing in more than 2 million households, just announced it will share the information with Tru Optik’s OTT Marketing Cloud, allowing advertisers to build custom segments based on TV viewing habits and even to retarget TV ads at specific households.