Bombora

The​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ Pulse of B2B: Why Bombora is the Intent Data Heavyweight You Can’t Ignore Any B2B marketer and salesperson would agree that spraying and praying is the most annoying way of outreach. You may have invested a lot into creating great content and spent countless hours on emails and still, you would find that you have been contacting people who don’t need your product or solution at all! Imagine trying to convince someone that they need a treadmill just because they have been running a marathon – sure, they would be your "target demographic" if you were selling fitness equipment, but the timing is just completely off. This is precisely what Bombora set out to fix. I have recently spent a considerable amount of time exploring their entire setting to find out if their claim to fame "Company Surge" data is really as good as the hype suggests. Here's my frank, experiential review of its working and whether it can be helpful for your sales department. The Secret Sauce: The Data Co-op It is crucial to first get an idea about the origin of Bombora’s data. To be different from those competitors who regularly scrape publicly available web data or solely rely on bidstream data (which can be very noisy and unreliable), Bombora was the first to come up with the novel idea of a B2B Data Co-op. They have gotten thousands of agreements with the finest B2B publishers, research and technology websites of the world. If, for example, a corporate lead on a company is spending 20 minutes on 3 different reputable websites to read in-depth articles about "Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture," Bombora will recognize this as a signal to that company. Since this data is gathered externally via only the publisher's page directly without an intermediary, it is a lot cleaner and more "intent-weighted" than a mere click on a social media advertisement. Understanding "Company Surge" The greatest treasure of the solution is without a doubt the Company Surge Score. This is what actually leads to making the data used in real life. Bombora is not only revealing a company’s research interest but also quantifying a company’s changes in behavior over time (e.g., current behavior against a baseline of typical behavior) by monitoring a few weeks. A giant conglomerate that normally only reads ten articles related to "Cloud Migration" in a whole month, but then suddenly during a week, they read a hundred is a Surge. Bombora characterizes the level of a surge (usually 0 to 100). Anything above 60 usually designates to a buying committee that is looking for a vendor and is probably getting ready to decide on which one to use. What I Liked: The Good Stuff Focus on Privacy: Bombora should be applauded for their data ethics and safety when the world is heavily regulated by GDPR and CCPA standards. Their co-op is consent-based, so the data is licensed ethically. Therefore, you do not have to worry about the legal "grey areas" that disorder some other data providers. Numerous Integration Possibilities: Bombora is not a local platform. It can be easily integrated with Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Feel free to personalize your notification system with Slack alerts or account tagging in targeted ads so that the sales rep dealing with a given lead is informed once his account starts "surging." Extremely Detailed Topic Taxonomy: They cover over 12,000 B2B topics to the granularity level. No matter if your product is a highly specialized HR software or a piece of mechanical equipment for the production of industrial goods, there will be a cluster of topics relevant to your product.

The Reality Check: Where it Falls Short Every platform and product have room for improvement and here is what I think you should be aware of in Bombora: Firstly, it is not at the person level, but the account level. At first, this might sound like a limitation, but if you think about it, even the most advanced ABM programs talk about accounts rather than individuals. However, it does mean that you cannot just rely on Bombora to give you the turnkey solution when it comes to contact information. For the latter, you will still need to turn to the likes of ZoomInfo or Apollo for lead intelligence and contact details. Secondly, there is not a single person that will have the full picture just from looking at data. If you are just looking at raw data without any proper filters and thresholds, you will be "swimming" with all kinds of data that is essentially irrelevant or just "noise." So, in order to complete the picture, somebody with deep knowledge of RevOps or Marketing Ops will need to "come out of the shadows." Thirdly, it has a price tag worthy of its features. Being an enterprise-level tool, its licensing fees can be quite high. It, therefore, becomes a co-investment that maybe more mid-market and enterprise types rather than small startups currently can afford.

The Verdict: Who Should Buy It? In case you are executing an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, then Bombora should be considered one of the indispensable elements of your technology stack. Think of it as going from simply guessing which accounts to focus on, to having a heatmap of the entire market literally at your fingertips. Moreover, it is about transforming your "cold call" team into a "consulting" team that just appears on the scene at the right moment when the prospect is aware of the problem and wants to solve it. Of course, it is not going to substitute your customer relationship management system or your contact database, but it definitely brings the "timing" dimension that those tools are lacking.