As a consumer, I’ve gotten used to the fact that websites like Amazon track who I am and what I’ve purchase and customize the experience accordingly. (I may not be thrilled about it, but I accept it.) Now San Francisco startup Demandbase wants to bring a similar level of customization to companies selling products and services to other businesses.
Chief executive Chris Golec said the business sales teams have lagged behind the consumer world on this front, in part because you need a different set of data. Business salespeople care less about your Web browsing behavior and more about which company you’re from. That’s where Demandbase’s “real-time ID” service comes in. When someone visits the website of a Demandbase customer, Demandbase can guess the visitor’s company based on their IP address. (There are more than 800 million addresses in the database.)
Demandbase has already announced some features around real-time ID, such as the ability to customize the chat experience for customer support. Today, it’s launching a similar integration with Web forms. Golec acknowledged the topic is not “super-sexy”, but he said forms are “the Achilles heel of B2B marketing.” Basically, at some point businesses want you to fill out a form on their site so they can contact you, and that’s usually when you disappear.
Golec said a big reason those forms don’t get filled out is that they’re just too long. Demandbase fixes that problem by combining its real-time ID service with its database of 30 million business contacts. When someone fills out a form, not only does Demandbase know what company they work for, but it can also guess who they are, even if only a small amount of information is provided. When Golec demonstrated the service for me, he only filled in his first initial and the first few letters of his last name, but that gave Demandbase enough information to provide the rest of his contact details.
And this is just the start of Demandbase’s efforts to help businesses deliver a personalized website experience to their customers, he added.
“As companies rely on their website more and more to be more than just brochure-ware, they really want to make it the point of interaction with their customers,” Golec said. “We’ve announced products in a few of these categories, but there's at least another half dozen applications involving real-time identification [that] could make a big impact.”
Demandbase’s investors include Adobe, Altos Ventures, and Sigma Partners.