Q&A with Clive Armitage, CEO at Agent3

Media 7 | July 12, 2021

Clive Armitage, CEO at Agent3, co-founded Agent3 in January 2013 to help organizations use data, technology and content to build better sales pipelines that are quicker to close, typically through innovative Account Based Marketing (ABM) programs. Prior to starting Agent3, Clive was the CEO of Bite Communications; an international communications agency that he co-founded in 1995 with four others and which grew to more than 300 people in 14 offices by the time he left to start Agent3. During his career, Clive has worked in South Africa and San Francisco and is now based back in London where he lives with his wife and three children.

We use data to understand the need of the buyer and technology to engage the buyer at the right time, via the right format.



MEDIA 7: What inspires you the most about the marketing and communications industry?
CLIVE ARMITAGE:
I’ve always loved the ingenuity of marketers; that amazing ability to come up with fresh, creative ideas that help a brand meet its commercial goals.  It’s truly energizing to be in an industry where survival means coming up with better and better ways to support a brand in reaching its stakeholders profitably and memorably.


M7: How does Agent3 help marketers keep up with changing shifts in the market and meet their expectations?
CA:
We have to act as the eyes and ears of marketing innovation for our clients; they trust us to help them navigate the pace of change in the way that the process of marketing is evolving.  Building that trust takes years of hard work and diligence but I think we’re now at a point where, from a scale perspective with around 160 people in 7 locations, we act as a trusted partner for our client base.  It also helps that we have an intellectually curious set of employees who span everything from data science to creative writing.  Our people work exceptionally hard at delivering innovation created within Agent3 as well as watching where innovation may be happening elsewhere, in order to ensure they can truly advise their clients in the right way.


We have to act as the eyes and ears of marketing innovation for our clients; they trust us to help them navigate the pace of change in the way that the process of marketing is evolving.



M7: How does Agent3 help sales teams understand and present their products in an engaging manner?
CA:
Working with our marketing stakeholders (who are often the budget holder too…) we work with sales to align their efforts with marketing programs into key and named accounts.  Accordingly, we arm sales teams with key insights into those key accounts through our Insights and Intelligence division.  Our positioning specialists, The Craft, then work with sales teams to create compelling value propositions that can differentiate their brand when talking to key accounts.  We also provide creative assets for sales teams to utilize at every touch point in the buying process.  And lastly, we will provide access to technologies such as our in-house developed social selling application SOsell that will help drive better engagement for sales teams into their key accounts.


M7: Agent3’s product SOsell was awarded the Marketing Excellence Award for Enabling Sales to Accelerate Growth by ITSMA. How has this AI-enabled social selling application helped your clients accelerate their growth?
CA:
Over the last 18 months, selling has naturally had to shift from a historically face-to-face biased activity to a predominantly social and digital model.  So any brand that has been able to adapt to this shift fastest has been able to grab market share as a result.  SOsell works by making social selling easy for sellers; it’s an application that is designed to utilize AI to provide the user with intelligence about when to post content on social channels, what content to post and when.  SOsell takes the effort out of social selling and as a result, has been really well received by its users.


If you are not utilizing the power of data, technology and content then you are failing to be a modern marketer.



M7: What are some of the biggest marketing challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic? How does business social media help bridge the gap?
CA:
The obvious challenge created by Covid is that physical events, have just not been possible.  Given conferences and exhibitions have often been significant activities for marketing to focus on, and coalesce campaigns around, marketers have had to look for alternatives methods to engage customers and prospects.  Step forward digital engagement.  What has been fascinating to see is how marketing teams and agencies have quickly pivoted to using digital engagement to plug the gap caused by the lack of physical contact.  As a result, thoughtful, well-developed content that is delivered across multiple channels to audiences at the point of interest, has become much more sophisticated during the pandemic.  And increasingly, it’s hard to imagine that, as the pandemic diminishes in impact, marketing teams will revert back to more traditional forms of engagement; the digital/social genie is well and truly out of the bottle.


M7: According to you, how can organizations build better sales pipelines using data, content and technology in the present times?
CA:
Think about your personal experience; if someone targets you for sales and marketing purposes, you’re likely to respond if the approach is timely, personalized and relevant, right?  Well, that’s what data, technology and content allow us to do when targeting buyers.  We use data to really understand the need of the buyer.  We use technology to engage the buyer at the right time, via the right format.  And we use compelling content to create an emotive reaction that is likely to drive engagement.  Frankly, if you are not utilizing the power of data, technology and content then you are failing to be a modern marketer.

ABOUT AGENT3

Founded in 2013, Agent3 is the global leader in the field of true end-to-end ABM programs informed by insight and data, and driven by audience focused content. With customers including LinkedIn, Pure Storage, Intel and Sony, Agent3 has offices in London, Woodbridge (UK), Sydney, Sofia, New York and San Francisco.  Agent3 helps its customers achieve more, and better, opportunities for greater wallet share, engagement and perception change by combining constant innovation across data, technology and creativity for its proven ABM programs.

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ABM Trailblazer Demandbase Announces Buying Group AI, the Next Breakthrough in B2B

PR Newswire | June 06, 2023

Demandbase, the Smarter GTM™ company that helps B2B organizations hit their revenue goals, today introduces the biggest breakthrough in B2B since ABM — AI-powered buying groups. Demandbase One™ will be the first and only platform to use cutting edge, generative AI to analyze millions of data points, drawing from more than 150M B2B contacts combined with the industry's deepest advertising, intent, and engagement data to generate dynamic B2B buying groups, assign roles and personas, and recommend new contacts. It also will aggregate buying signals across the group and streamline engagement, unlocking a clear competitive advantage and saving hours of manual research and guesswork to drive greater revenue growth. "As a company that heavily relies on ABM, Demandbase's new Buying Group solution will be a game changer," said Dan Cafiero, senior program manager, Account-Based Marketing and Paid Media at Seagate. 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Hootsuite Releases an Enhanced Inbox to Help Digital Marketers Streamline Their Customer Service Experience on Social

Business Wire | May 30, 2023

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Folloze Plus Outreach Empowers Sales and Marketing With Advanced Orchestration to Engage Prospects and Further Pipeline Goals

Business Wire | June 02, 2023

Folloze, creator of the world’s first and only no-code B2B Buyer Experience Platform (BX 3.0), today announced Folloze plus Outreach, a new integration that enables customers to connect the power of Folloze BX 3.0 and sales engagement within the Outreach Sales Execution Platform. This new single interface allows sales and marketing to auto-personalize content experiences via Folloze boards to Outreach sequences with just a few clicks, unlocking agility and productivity, while starting a long-term, rich, data-driven relationship. Additionally, first-party behavioral analytics are now easily accessed through a dashboard that allows sales professionals and managers to focus their resources on the best opportunities, winning more deals faster. “Folloze and Outreach provide teams with the ability to uplevel sales and marketing activities in their own respective ways,” said David Brutman, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Folloze. “The integration addresses a critical gap as budgets are shrinking and organizations strive to garner better results with current or reduced investments. 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This provides the foundation for persistent profiling and ongoing experience continuity, enabling a stronger communication channel with less back and forth email messaging, which saves time and improves relationships. Campaign efforts result in actual pipeline creation, building a revenue engine like never before. “Outreach is committed to making it easier for our customers to create pipeline and close more deals. We seek partners who further this mission, and Folloze definitely fits our criteria,” added Phillip Friedman, Head of Partner and Ecosystem at Outreach. “This integration helps sales and marketing teams become both more strategic and personalized in their prospect interactions, making each sales rep’s touch that much more impactful.” The integrated solution makes that all-important first touch even more compelling for joint customers by allowing Outreach users to understand prospects’ behavior with Folloze’s first-party intent signals within the Outreach platform. This deep behavioral data allows sellers to focus on the most likely prospects and quickly respond to capture moments of interest with personalized content. These benefits lead to far more cohesive, efficient, and effective sales and marketing efforts. “We look to get the most out of every tech investment, so we talked with the teams at Folloze and Outreach to see if there was a possibility to streamline the information flow to sales reps while keeping content consistent. We also wanted our sales reps to be able to take advantage of unique behavioral insights within one view,” said Benjamin Smokovich, Global Director of Innovation and Tech at SAP. “Our partners at Folloze and Outreach instantly recognized how compelling such an integration would be, and what they developed has far exceeded our expectations. Our teams are already reaping the benefits.” Specific capabilities available through the integration include: Add a Folloze board to an Outreach email with just a few clicks: Sharing an entire personalized experience is the most strategic way to engage prospects and track buyer behavior. Add a direct link to Folloze content in an Outreach email: Taking it one step further, the integration makes it possible to share a killer piece of content within a Folloze board, incorporated into an Outreach email, to quickly grab a prospect’s attention. Personalized Folloze board experience: Through a completely automated process, each prospect receives a customized and highly relevant experience that drives accelerated engagement and generates intent insights. View account and contact engagement activity within Outreach: Thanks to a fully integrated Folloze dashboard, sales professionals and managers are able to get real-time, first-party intent data to prioritize efforts and understand what’s working. Identity matching capabilities provide behavioral data: More insights give sales and marketing the ability to identify and truly understand who their prospects are so they can serve them much more effectively and efficiently at scale. Upcoming Webinar On June 13th, Folloze will host a webinar with featured guests from Outreach and SAP who will discuss modern marketing and sales techniques that will help you deploy your people, technology, and processes that will result in more account engagement and higher sales velocity. Please visit https://engage.folloze.com/folloze-plus-outreach-webinar to register. To find out more details on how the Folloze plus Outreach integration could work for you, please visit https://www.folloze.com/partners/outreach. About Folloze Folloze, creator of the world’s first and only no-code B2B Buyer Experience Platform (BX 3.0), is used by B2B marketing, sales, and revenue teams. Folloze BX 3.0 empowers any marketer to easily build data-driven, highly engaging, personalized content destinations across the entire B2B buyer journey to drive deeper account engagement and revenue growth. Top B2B brands, including ServiceNow, Google Cloud, Cisco, Autodesk, Gigamon, and UL trust Folloze to boost customer engagement, revenue growth, and expansion across their target accounts. To learn more, visit https://www.folloze.com/.

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ABM Trailblazer Demandbase Announces Buying Group AI, the Next Breakthrough in B2B

PR Newswire | June 06, 2023

Demandbase, the Smarter GTM™ company that helps B2B organizations hit their revenue goals, today introduces the biggest breakthrough in B2B since ABM — AI-powered buying groups. Demandbase One™ will be the first and only platform to use cutting edge, generative AI to analyze millions of data points, drawing from more than 150M B2B contacts combined with the industry's deepest advertising, intent, and engagement data to generate dynamic B2B buying groups, assign roles and personas, and recommend new contacts. It also will aggregate buying signals across the group and streamline engagement, unlocking a clear competitive advantage and saving hours of manual research and guesswork to drive greater revenue growth. "As a company that heavily relies on ABM, Demandbase's new Buying Group solution will be a game changer," said Dan Cafiero, senior program manager, Account-Based Marketing and Paid Media at Seagate. "The ability to automatically identify and engage with accurate buying groups, understanding their personas and roles, will revolutionize our sales and marketing efforts. This tool truly understands the complex dynamics of B2B decision-making processes, cutting through the noise to reach the right people at the right time. We can't wait to get our hands on it." "B2B GTM teams have known for a long time that the traditional lead-based approach really misses the mark, because individuals don't buy solutions in the enterprise — that focus is too narrow," says Brewster Stanislaw, chief product officer, at Demandbase. "That's why account-based marketing came into existence… but the reality is an account-based approach has its drawbacks as well. It's too broad because it's not every person at an account that participates in a buying decision. The sweet spot is in between; it's the buying committee, made of influencers, champions, blockers, etc., that actually determines where and when an enterprise will invest in a given solution." Stanislaw continues, "Until now, it's been too hard to implement buying groups because companies had to rely on manual guesswork and faulty data. Our AI-powered buying groups solve this once and for all by delivering on the audience that is 'just right.' We're using artificial intelligence to analyze massive behavioral data sets to generate accurate buying groups and automatically assign roles and personas to each of their constituent members. This empowers our customers to be optimally efficient across their entire GTM motion. By focusing on the buying group as their core GTM object, they can generate more demand with greater velocity through the customer journey, while minimizing waste by investing resources where they are most impactful. This is a revolution for B2B GTM teams that will unlock efficient growth, and those that adopt will be the CMOs and CROs of the future." The industry has recognized the need to target and reach buying groups, with Forrester Research saying that the goal of this approach is to "better align with the true buyer in virtually all B2B buying decisions — a group of people (the buying group) all working together to solve a business issue." "Identifying and engaging with the buying committee is the key to winning deals but it's really hard," commented Craig Rosenberg, chief platform officer at Scale Venture Partners. "That's why the introduction of AI-powered buying groups is so powerful for GTM teams. It eliminates the manual guesswork for B2B GTM teams thus allowing these teams to focus on driving increased demand." Historically, teams have relied on guesswork, manual processes, and missing and inaccurate data, resulting in systematic under-estimation of all personas that make up the full committee. With Demandbase Buying Group AI, this will all change. For the first time, companies will be able to use AI to automatically generate their ideal buying groups, create different buying groups for different products and journey stages, find the right contacts for each persona — adding them to their CRM, if not already there — and engage them with accurate contact information. The result will be fewer missed, lost, or delayed deals and vastly superior go-to-market execution. Demandbase pioneered the ABM movement and is now leading the way in this latest evolution of B2B go-to-market. The company is uniquely positioned to deliver on AI-generated buying groups with its massive data set that combines the customer's engagement data with Demandbase's B2B data — including AI-validated contact data on more than 150M buyers plus expansive advertising and behavioral data — to see how individuals interact across products and with each other. Demandbase Buying Group AI will launch out of beta in Q3 of 2023. See how it works to learn more and discover why buying groups are the foundation of a modern, Smarter GTM™ platform. About Demandbase Demandbase helps B2B companies hit their revenue goals using fewer resources. How? By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase, powered by combining your sales and marketing data with our validated B2B data — what we call Account Intelligence. Better data makes better AI, that's Smarter GTM™.

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Hootsuite Releases an Enhanced Inbox to Help Digital Marketers Streamline Their Customer Service Experience on Social

Business Wire | May 30, 2023

As the global leader in the social media management space, Hootsuite understands the wild nature of social and the flurry of messages and conversations that social marketers are constantly struggling to manage. To strengthen its dedication to addressing the ‘always-on’ customer service challenges faced by social marketers, Hootsuite unveiled its latest and enhanced tool, Inbox. According to Hootsuite’s 2023 Social Trends Report, 49% of organizations make social customer service the responsibility of the marketing team, while 40% of consumers expect brands to problem-solve in the channels of their choice (e.g., Instagram Messenger). Marketing teams now have to manage yet another channel, become customer service agents, and address their customers’ inquiries within the social channels they live on. As social media managers see customers increasingly turn to private messaging for customer service inquiries, Hootsuite developed an Enhanced Inbox to enable timeless and seamless social inquiry management. Inbox encourages efficient collaboration among internal teams, and offers a suite of features to streamline responses and speed up service. “Our social team polled customers to understand their pain points on social, and what we heard was that our customers’ greatest struggle is not being able to engage with their customers and respond to inquiries 24/7,” said Natalia Williams, Chief Product Officer, Hootsuite. “Our product development strategy has been deeply anchored in making our customers’ day-to-day easier. Upgrading our Inbox tool to simplify, accelerate and empower users to provide exceptional customer service and ultimately propel their business growth takes our commitment to the next level.” Inbox provides a centralized platform for social media marketers to manage all DMs, with new embedded functionalities that make responding to inquiries more efficient, without jeopardizing a quality response. SMMs and customer service teams can now easily collaborate with multiple teams to quickly resolve customer messages, automate service, offer social value and protect their brand. “Prior to using Hootsuite’s new Inbox, we didn’t have a social care team,” said Santiago Garcia Solimei, Global Head of Social Media & Brands PR, Meliá Hotels International. “Now we have dedicated resources answering users through over 500 social media accounts, allowing us to be unified in our brand voice across the board.” The key features of Inbox equips Hootsuite Business and Enterprise users to: Manage conversations in one place with one centralized inbox for all public, private, organic and dark post conversations across social channels. Search for messages and comments across all social channels. Easily collaborate with multiple teams/departments efficiently and confidently by using message routing to assign responses to the right individuals and teams. Improve collaboration across teams with assignments, agent collision avoidance, skill-based routing, and more. Speed up response times, simplify, and automate service with saved replies, autoresponders, and auto-prioritization of messages based on SLAs and response times. Connect to existing CRMs and chatbots to enable better service and deeper insights into the value of a conversation. Bring social conversations into existing customer intelligence platforms. Get insights to improve performance by reviewing, analyzing, and reporting on activity and performance to better understand the value of service. Add CSAT surveys to measure and improve customer satisfaction by sending CSAT surveys in the customer’s language based on business rules. Monitor potential crises by tagging, searching and setting up alerts to monitor conversations and catch potential crises before they occur. Keep the conversation going on the move and stay connected by viewing, filtering, assigning and replying to conversations with Hootsuite’s mobile app. Combine social profiles by linking customer profiles across social channels together to get a holistic view of messages across multiple social networks. Enable automatic language detection to trigger auto responders in a customer’s language and automatically route conversations to teams with specific language skills. For more information on Inbox, visit our website here. About Hootsuite Hootsuite helps customers harness the power of social to ignite their brand and business. As the global leader in social media management, Hootsuite powers social media for brands and organizations around the world, from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises. Hootsuite’s unparalleled expertise in social media management, social insights, employee advocacy, and social customer care empowers organizations to strategically grow their brands, businesses, and customer relationships with social media. Hootsuite Academy, the industry-leading online learning platform, empowers education and growth through a wide range of certifications and has delivered over 1 million courses to students worldwide.

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Folloze Plus Outreach Empowers Sales and Marketing With Advanced Orchestration to Engage Prospects and Further Pipeline Goals

Business Wire | June 02, 2023

Folloze, creator of the world’s first and only no-code B2B Buyer Experience Platform (BX 3.0), today announced Folloze plus Outreach, a new integration that enables customers to connect the power of Folloze BX 3.0 and sales engagement within the Outreach Sales Execution Platform. This new single interface allows sales and marketing to auto-personalize content experiences via Folloze boards to Outreach sequences with just a few clicks, unlocking agility and productivity, while starting a long-term, rich, data-driven relationship. Additionally, first-party behavioral analytics are now easily accessed through a dashboard that allows sales professionals and managers to focus their resources on the best opportunities, winning more deals faster. “Folloze and Outreach provide teams with the ability to uplevel sales and marketing activities in their own respective ways,” said David Brutman, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Folloze. “The integration addresses a critical gap as budgets are shrinking and organizations strive to garner better results with current or reduced investments. By bringing these dynamic platforms together, joint customers that lean on their sales channels as a critical driver of engagement and pipeline acceleration will now have a more unified experience that amplifies value and drives greater performance and personalization.” A Smarter Way to Drive Pipeline and Engage Prospects By integrating the prospecting capabilities of two industry leaders, Folloze and Outreach help sales and marketing teams play to win from the first human touch by creating a better initial experience and the backend data to prioritize the most engaged and best opportunities. Marketers can orchestrate campaigns through a variety of channels such as ads, social media, physical mail, marketing emails, as well as with the sales team, all reinforcing each other with consistent messaging and content and one standardized analytics stream handed over directly to sellers. This provides the foundation for persistent profiling and ongoing experience continuity, enabling a stronger communication channel with less back and forth email messaging, which saves time and improves relationships. Campaign efforts result in actual pipeline creation, building a revenue engine like never before. “Outreach is committed to making it easier for our customers to create pipeline and close more deals. We seek partners who further this mission, and Folloze definitely fits our criteria,” added Phillip Friedman, Head of Partner and Ecosystem at Outreach. “This integration helps sales and marketing teams become both more strategic and personalized in their prospect interactions, making each sales rep’s touch that much more impactful.” The integrated solution makes that all-important first touch even more compelling for joint customers by allowing Outreach users to understand prospects’ behavior with Folloze’s first-party intent signals within the Outreach platform. This deep behavioral data allows sellers to focus on the most likely prospects and quickly respond to capture moments of interest with personalized content. These benefits lead to far more cohesive, efficient, and effective sales and marketing efforts. “We look to get the most out of every tech investment, so we talked with the teams at Folloze and Outreach to see if there was a possibility to streamline the information flow to sales reps while keeping content consistent. We also wanted our sales reps to be able to take advantage of unique behavioral insights within one view,” said Benjamin Smokovich, Global Director of Innovation and Tech at SAP. “Our partners at Folloze and Outreach instantly recognized how compelling such an integration would be, and what they developed has far exceeded our expectations. Our teams are already reaping the benefits.” Specific capabilities available through the integration include: Add a Folloze board to an Outreach email with just a few clicks: Sharing an entire personalized experience is the most strategic way to engage prospects and track buyer behavior. Add a direct link to Folloze content in an Outreach email: Taking it one step further, the integration makes it possible to share a killer piece of content within a Folloze board, incorporated into an Outreach email, to quickly grab a prospect’s attention. Personalized Folloze board experience: Through a completely automated process, each prospect receives a customized and highly relevant experience that drives accelerated engagement and generates intent insights. View account and contact engagement activity within Outreach: Thanks to a fully integrated Folloze dashboard, sales professionals and managers are able to get real-time, first-party intent data to prioritize efforts and understand what’s working. Identity matching capabilities provide behavioral data: More insights give sales and marketing the ability to identify and truly understand who their prospects are so they can serve them much more effectively and efficiently at scale. Upcoming Webinar On June 13th, Folloze will host a webinar with featured guests from Outreach and SAP who will discuss modern marketing and sales techniques that will help you deploy your people, technology, and processes that will result in more account engagement and higher sales velocity. Please visit https://engage.folloze.com/folloze-plus-outreach-webinar to register. To find out more details on how the Folloze plus Outreach integration could work for you, please visit https://www.folloze.com/partners/outreach. About Folloze Folloze, creator of the world’s first and only no-code B2B Buyer Experience Platform (BX 3.0), is used by B2B marketing, sales, and revenue teams. Folloze BX 3.0 empowers any marketer to easily build data-driven, highly engaging, personalized content destinations across the entire B2B buyer journey to drive deeper account engagement and revenue growth. Top B2B brands, including ServiceNow, Google Cloud, Cisco, Autodesk, Gigamon, and UL trust Folloze to boost customer engagement, revenue growth, and expansion across their target accounts. To learn more, visit https://www.folloze.com/.

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