It was announced today that Terminus has acquired Sigstr, the email signature marketing platform that turns the billions of 1:1 employee emails sent every year into powerful brand engagements.
Our excitement about this acquisition is founded in our actual usage, as Sigstr has been a part of our own ABM tech stack for years. Anyone who’s received an email from the Terminus team has seen the omnipresent banners that sit just below our email signatures, a reflection of both our confidence in and reliance upon Sigstr as a staple of our marketing strategy.
Our first-hand experience coupled with our shared vision for the future of B2B marketing got us started, but it’s the way the Sigstr technology and data extend and super-charge our platform that drove the acquisition. I am incredibly excited to share how this addition accelerates our vision and brings amazing value to our customers.
The Journey to Full-Funnel ABM Platform
You may have seen we named Tim Kopp as CEO earlier this month. Exciting stuff and he shared some thoughts on his vision for account-based transformation and Terminus’ part in making it possible.
While Tim’s detailed vision is worth reading, the SparkNotes version is this: account-based marketing is evolving as companies recognize that an account-centric strategy drives better business outcomes, not just better marketing results. We’re seeing this confirmed in both market research and analyst predictions: a recent ITSMA study indicated that 73% of companies say they’ll increase ABM spending in 2020; and in a recent report and subsequent blog, Laura Ramos, Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research, wrote, “Forrester predicts that by 2025, the term ‘ABM’ will disappear as account-centric becomes the way most B2B organizations identify, plan, manage, and measure buying and post-sale motions.”
Successful transformation into an account-centric organization will require more than sales, customer success, and marketing alignment, though. Instead, it will be predicated on deep integration across revenue teams, zippered from the top of the funnel through pipeline acceleration and customer success — better known as a full-funnel account-based approach.
To do this right, an account-based platform will need even greater account intelligence capabilities and the ability to execute at the point of engagement across multiple channels. With Sigstr, Terminus is poised to deliver both.
Offering the Most Complete Account Intelligence with Person-Level Data
As we extend the universe of relevant account-based data points to include person-level insights, it’s important to understand why this information is such an essential element of the Terminus product roadmap and journey to full-funnel functionality.
For years, Terminus has focused on developing deep account-level intelligence centered on prioritizing accounts based on what their employees are doing around the web, anonymously on your website, and how well they fit your ICP — and making all of that as seamless as possible.
Marketing automation did an adequate job of delivering engagement data for known contacts in your CRM. But as ABM has evolved the way B2B marketers operate, it’s become apparent that there are gaps even on the known side of the data. That’s where Sigstr’s relationship data comes into play.
Relationship data adds a rich 1st-party piece of intelligence to your account-based efforts. To deliver this information, Sigstr uses its proprietary Relationship Score, which analyzes the email and calendar interactions between employees at your company and those at your customer and prospective customer accounts. It provides detailed insights into the sentiment and strength of relationships at an account, buying team, and individual level. Utilizing this data set alongside engagement and intent intelligence already native to the Terminus platform supercharges how your revenue teams prioritize efforts and take action.
Expanding ABM with Sigstr’s Email Advertising
Sigstr also represents an expanded engagement touchpoint through email advertising — which Sigstr often refers to as “your company’s most overlooked advertising channel.”
Practically, this has a few implications for our customers:
- With Sigstr, marketing and sales teams can align account-centric messages across the entire buyer journey, from digital advertising to personal email interactions, tailoring campaigns with a consistent message and brand experience.
- Beyond that, it will allow customers to better activate their best-performing ad channel by integrating personalized, account-centric creative messages into every email interaction.
- Ultimately, it will allow customers to prioritize accounts, ad spend, and marketing and sales resources based on all three triggers — engagement data, intent data, and relationship data.
The outcome? More and better account-based marketing channels.
Terminus hasn’t tackled email-focused account-based tactics before because we’ve always believed that there’s an inherent issue with marketing automation email — an idea that’s being affirmed, time and again, as email compliance tightens to protect data and privacy.
In the same turn, though, we recognize that 1:1 sales conversations via email are still breaking through. This represents a significant opportunity for marketers, in particular, to own highly-targeted visual real estate — one which Sigstr has already captured and executed at a high level.
The Result: Deeper Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sales and marketing alignment is part of Terminus’ DNA. It’s well-documented across everything we do, and it’s a strategy that’s proven effective for revenue outcomes. Sigstr only furthers that mission.
Imagine: your marketing team has identified a key Enterprise pursuit account that’s been engaging with your content anonymously. To follow up, your account development team reaches out via a personal email in which the decision-maker sees a creative message that’s tied to what they have seen in digital ads. And — score! — secures a meeting.
Upon sharing a calendar invitation for a discovery and demo call the following week, you begin to notice how widely it’s being shared and accepted by your target account. This triggers an increase in display advertising and LinkedIn ads directed at key roles in the account. Additionally, that same creative and messaging are connected to the banner ad at the bottom of every email interaction your sales and solution consulting team shares with the account.
With this approach, interest in what your company can do for the account is piqued before the meeting. Contacts with whom you haven’t even interacted yet have an understanding of what you can do for them and attend the scheduled meeting — and the likelihood that this opportunity moves to the next stage as a bigger, faster deal increases exponentially.
While that scenario is tee’d up as a hypothetical situation, in reality, it’s the near-term future for our integrated account-based platform.
We’ve got big plans for Terminus and Sigstr, in the coming months and beyond, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next!
