“The beauty of content marketing is that the content sticks around,” explains Anand Sanwal, CEO and Co-Founder of the data analytics company CB Insights. In an extensive interview, Sanwal discusses some of the company's marketing tactics and philosophies in the data information business of tracking “private companies, their investors, their acquirers and the industries they compete in.” (For more insights from this interview, see Predictive Analytics, Novel Visualization Draw Customers To 'Must Have' Data.)
Sanwal continues, “I know this isn't a novel idea, but it's true anyway -- the long tail for content really pays off for us. We’ll do something that all of a sudden catches fire six months later because something happens in the news and we’re the only folks with real data about it. And again we will see a bunch of leads.” The company’s content marketing that is published through its research blog, daily newsletters and white papers Sanwal believes is the “customer acquisition ‘golden goose.’”
“We do paid acquisition, we’ll do
Presenting data in a world of opinions
CBInsights' research blog and newsletter have gained readers and media attention by presenting data in areas that are often filled with opinion. Sanwal explains how the data team creates "pretty compelling" content:
- Step 1—Data pounding. “Lots of coverage in emerging tech is one big anecdote-driven space. It’s just a bunch of smart people talking at each other, but nobody ever has data. Or it is very cherry-picked, like ‘based on my experience….’So we choose a topic and we just pound it into the ground with data.”
- “We are anal to the point of being obsessive about what data goes out. So it is checked and rechecked. That’s been our killer acquisition vehicle and growth vehicle.
- Step 2—Zeitgeist reading. Lately, winning topics for CBInsights have been all about “unbundling,” such as how a new company can “unbundle
FedEx or how it can unbundle WellsFargo, keeping in mind the start ups that are attacking those spaces. People are trying to figure out the disruptors.”
- Step 3—Presentation perfection. “We are always experimenting with different kinds of presentation forms for the content. Some of it is long form, some of it is downloadable PDFs, some of it is infographics. I think we’ve gotten elements of it down to a science, but there is still a lot that we are figuring out.”
Presenting data doesn’t mean it has to be boring
Sanwal explains that the press use of his data deeply affects his customer acquisition. “The newsletter and the PR are interconnected. The newsletter feeds articles that reference our data. It becomes a virtuous cycle. Another journalist sees it and says let me reach out to these guys to see if they have data I need.” CB Insights has a list of more than 400 journalists who they regularly work with and has resulted in more than 10 press mentions daily, according to the company.
Getting the attention of the press and consumers consistently is key to feeding the cycle, and Sanwal credits a recent change in the editorial tone. “We try to have a voice in the content. That’s something we learned over time. We thought since we are selling to institutional customers we should talk to them in a certain way. Up until about 12 months ago, our newsletter was very boring with lots of jargon. It used language in ways in a way that no one actually really talks. Like ‘how do we level synergies.’ Then we started being more human, putting in pop culture references, and being a little snarky at times.”
How much is that data in the window?
The company is careful not to give away the underlying data in the research blog, but will let potential subscribers get a taste through a free trial.
The pricing for a subscription is team-based, not seat based; so for a one-team contract the list price runs from about $14,000 per year for the minimum access to about $53,000 for all the product features. By contrast, although not a direct comparison, the minimum price posted publicly by competitor Privco is the annual cost of about $3,000 for a single seat.
Sanwal says that the company has been increasing their prices steadily since the company was founded by encouraging sampling, yet ultimately charging for refinements and new features through upselling. If the new capability is what he calls a ‘flavor’ innovation in that they cut the data slightly differently and it’s a new visualization, they typically roll it into the existing subscription levels. However, if they think it will be “a game changer and is super valuable, it’s going to take days off of the time it takes you to do something, then we create a stand alone module. And maybe our higher level paying customers get it rolled in. But then our customers who aren’t at that level won’t have access. Then if they see it and they like it, then there is a conversation about upgrading them.”
CB Insights claims a customer retention rate of 86% overall in 2014. Sanwal confirms this count, explaining that the metric represents the actual customers who signed up the year prior who were still subscribers in 2014. Segments where the churn is worse than average are customers that came in at a lower price. “When we were younger we would try to get the sale at any cost. It was just us being scrappy. $9,000 we’ll take it! They didn’t understand data or have a great need for it. So we were just force fitting our product for them.”
Retaining clients is the job of the department called Customer Success; it operates separately from sales/business development. Customer Success “looks out for the best interest of the client and don’t try to upsell so much. Customer Success asks ‘how do we make sure that the product is useful to you, how do we make sure that we train you so you are getting value out of it?’ And so upsell is not a thing they are doing all the time," explains Sanwal.
According to Sanwal, although venture funds is currently the largest customer segment, “They will probably fall to the second place in the next couple of months, with corporations taking their place. That’s because we can sell to lots of groups within those companies – intellectual property, M&A, ventures, business development, product, innovation, strategy. We have some big corporations who have seven or eight separate subscriptions to CB Insights.” Geographically, the U.S. is the fastest growing market, with Asia the second. 2014 started "with a growth spurt in Japan and concluded the year with significant momentum in China."
This is the second article based on an interview with Anand Sanwal. The first is Predictive Analytics, Novel Visualization Draw Customers To 'Must Have' Data
