MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Infer Inc., a leading provider of predictive technologies that help companies win more customers, today announced its launch of the first predictive prospect management platform for sales and marketing teams. Infer Prospect Management helps companies develop ideal customer profiles and expansion opportunities that unlock value with prospects and customers. The platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to make recommendations and trigger actions that help move prospects from one step in their customer journey to the next.
Since Infer’s $25 million Series B funding round last year, the predictive industry has exploded, with $214 million of venture capital invested in 2015 alone. However, many businesses are still relying primarily on their system of record for customer insight and not taking advantage of the full gamut of external data sources available to them. The new Infer Prospect Management platform enables segmentation using thousands of internal and external data signals, as well as predictive lead scores, to provide the most complete view of each prospect and help marketers and sales professionals determine their next-best programs and tasks.
Infer Prospect Management surfaces a wide range of attributes – from basic signals like contact title, company size or geography, to more complex characteristics such as a person’s role in the buying process, their recent marketing activity, their company’s overall fit for a product, or their current state within the customer lifecycle – along with detailed impact metrics. The platform empowers companies to easily define their high-value segments and buyer personas. Infer then triggers appropriate actions (i.e. recommended nurture programs, advertising, content, sales tasks, and more) for each profile group (i.e. “engaged SMBs”). Finally, the system helps companies expand beyond their existing prospects by analyzing outside data sources to identify new leads and markets to target next.
Beta customers have already achieved impressive results with Infer Prospect Management, including:
- Business intelligence company Looker uses the new predictive platform to slice and dice its prospects in order to uncover hidden opportunities and expand the business. For example, the company can pinpoint hot prospects the sales team is missing and trigger automated Salesforce alerts with specific sales governance tasks to unlock pipeline opportunity.
- Document productivity company Nitro turned to Infer to determine top segments and gain alignment across global teams. By narrowing in on the most valuable personas, such as ‘highly engaged IT decision-makers in the financial services industry,’ Nitro greatly increased deal velocity and conversion from content marketing efforts and nurture programs.
- Online training platform Mindflash leveraged Infer to easily identify users with high-fit scores at companies that use Salesforce. Based on that insight, the company targeted these customers with highly personalized messages about its upcoming Salesforce AppExchange packages.
“We use Infer’s new predictive platform to discover and target ideal customer profiles. By building segments and personas around Infer’s signals – such as whether a company uses Amazon Web Services, or whether its website contains B2B technology – we deliver better marketing campaigns and arm our sales reps with better data and insights,” said Rich Taylor, senior director of marketing at Looker. “As a result of a recent personalized campaign, we were able to boost our typical attendance and drive 20 percent more top prospects to a key regional event.”
Key features of the Infer Prospect Management platform include:
- Recommendations engine: The platform uses AI to make smart, actionable recommendations about whom to contact, when, and with which content. Infer can then initiate workflows directly within automation systems or other sales and marketing applications.
- On-the-fly predictive simulations: Dashboards and visualizations measure the impact of each prospect group, so sales and marketing teams can assess their effort against potential revenue opportunity as they’re developing programs.
- Ephemeral lists: Infer is the only provider to build and update prospect profiles in real-time. Prospects automatically move in and out of profiles as their behavior signals or businesses evolve, and each cohort’s performance is tracked in real-time for comparison.
“The industry has made huge strides in leveraging predictive over the past few years by compiling more and more external signals and honing predictive lead scoring models, but what’s been missing is a platform that can truly serve as the ‘brains’ of a company’s sales and marketing operation,” said Vik Singh, co-founder and CEO of Infer. “Infer Prospect Management accomplishes this by not only exposing a broad array of input signals to inform segmentation, personalized workflows and third-party applications, but also layering on recommendations and next-best actions that can be kicked off with just one click. This is the future, and Infer is at the forefront of the coming wave.”
Infer’s platform is a major step towards delivering the open, lightweight, connected marketing systems of the future. It uses advanced data science to intelligently match, merge and interpret data points from third-party sources and internal systems like Google Analytics, Marketo and Salesforce – creating comprehensive prospect profiles and fueling relevant recommendations. The platform’s powerful open APIs can pull customer attributes from any source, as well as push profile lists and tasks out to any of the 1,876 technologies that are available to sales and marketing teams today.
This game-changing product introduction builds on Infer’s recent momentum, including 222 percent growth in new business revenue quarter-over-quarter. Infer Prospect Management is now available to current Infer customers, and will be generally available to all companies in early 2016. For more information or to request early access, click here.
About Infer
Founded in 2010, Infer delivers a predictive-first platform that helps companies win more customers. It leverages proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with thousands of signals from the web. Customers include several large enterprises and numerous high growth companies like AdRoll, Cloudera, Concur, New Relic, Nitro, Tableau, Xactly and Zendesk. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Infer is funded by leading investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.
Additional Resources
- Read about Infer Prospect Management on the Infer blog
- Follow Infer on Twitter @InferInc
- Become a Facebook fan of Infer
- Find Infer on LinkedIn
