Month: February 2021

Metadata announces over 2x platform license revenue in 2020, almost 1000 active users with record-high customer retention, and on the path to profitability

San Francisco, CA, Feb 24, 2021 — metadata.io, the first demand generation platform for B2B marketers, today reports record revenue growth, customer growth, and overall momentum for the company for its fiscal year 2020, ending January 31. The momentum and uptick in company growth can be attributed to sophisticated B2B marketers embracing growth-focused demand generation technologies, and autonomous marketing operations as a vehicle for scale.

Metadata saw over 100%  increase in the number of customers and improved net retention by 3x. Demand marketers from companies like Zoom, Pendo, Thoughtspot, Okta, Workato, and Vonage have experienced as much as a 4.5X ROI in as little as 90 days using Metadata.  Metadata’s rapidly growing customer base continues to praise the technology for helping achieve B2B marketing results beyond the scale and scope they previously thought possible.  Metadata drove these outcomes for their customers in 2020, executing nearly $15M of ad spend across Facebook and LinkedIn with 30,990 experiments run. This activity generated 1,915,316 clicks from campaigns with 102,146 net new leads for customers and an impressive  3,832 triggered opportunities, resulting in $66M in triggered opportunity pipeline and 4.4x return on ad spend.

“We had our strongest year in 2020 and attribute our momentum growth to the demand in the market and the shift in the industry around demand generation technologies for B2B marketers. Marketers tell us that vanity metrics matter less, and tangible demand and pipeline are key”, says Gil Allouche, Founder & CEO at Metadata.”The innovation in our platform translates into actual revenue for our customers and enables the autonomous marketer to be a new reality.”

Metadata’s demand generation platform is a massive advantage for marketing teams as it sets the entire martech stack on autopilot by connecting existing tools and putting them to work. Metadata launched a new product, MetaMatch, a proprietary technology that allows B2B advertisers to build custom audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn, Programmatic Display and other channels using B2B targeting criteria (i.e. firmographic, technographic, demographic, buyer intent) using their proprietary targeting graph of over 1.4 billion business prospects.

Metadata introduced a LinkedIn audiences integration enabling dynamic contact and account targeting. The company offered functionality for customers including support for native LinkedIn targeting facets, custom fields for Sponsored Content and Lead Gen Forms, and the ability to launch video ads on LinkedIn that can dramatically increase conversion rates and lower CPL.

This year also brought the integration with G2 Buyer Intent data, available to mutual customers through G2’s integration hub. With this integration, G2 and metadata.io help marketing teams generate a high velocity of actionable leads by targeting ads at scale to the buying committees of accounts with high buying intent. Metadata integrates with the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, G2, Drift, HG Insights, the Trade Desk, Bombora, and other vendors to set them on autonomous mode. In addition to these integrations, Metadata added over 40 AI/multivariate enhancements to its campaign execution engine.

In 2020, Metadata raised $6.5m in an over-subscribed Series A round and a follow on investment, led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from Greycroft, York IE, Stormbreakers. Notable entrepreneurs, such as Mark Organ (Eloqua), Ilya Volodarsky (Segment), with over a dozen customers (e.g. UIPath VP of Growth, SocialChorus CEO, etc) invested in the round.

Metadata was also ranked as #233 fastest growing company in the U.S. for 2020 by Inc. magazine, announced a full sweep in the top leadership position in the G2 Fall 2020 Grid® Report for the Account-Based Advertising category, showing the ABM market shift into demand generation technologies. Metadata was also awarded “Innovator of the Year” at LinkedIn® Marketing Partner Awards, North America.

Learn more about our category creation in the podcast “B2B Category Creators,” featuring entrepreneurs who built and led trailblazing categories such as Godard Abel (G2), Nick Mehta (Gainsight), and Manny Medina (Outreach).

About Metadata

Metadata is the first demand generation platform that launches paid campaign experiments and self-optimizes to revenue. Through AI and machine learning, Metadata helps B2B marketers automate the repeatable and time-consuming parts of running paid campaigns so they can focus more of their time on strategy, targeting, and creative. B2B marketers at Zoom, Okta, and ThoughtSpot rely on Metadata to get closer to revenue.

Sales and marketing have always been a bit of an odd couple – think Tom and Jerry.

Sales people tend to have Type A personalities and we marketers tend to be Type B. Obviously a generalization, but you know what I’m saying. We communicate differently. We tackle challenges with a different approach. We’re compensated differently.

Despite the contrasts, sales and marketing rely on each other to do their jobs, making the relationship both transactional AND emotional. But acting on emotion in a business setting is not a good response. 

In most cases, sales and marketing teams want to be aligned but getting aligned is the challenge.

Ninety percent of sales and marketing professionals surveyed for a 2020 LinkedIn/Forrester report agree that when initiatives are aligned the customer experience is positively impacted. However, the same percentage — 90% — say they’re misaligned across strategy, content, process, and culture. Additional LinkedIn research shows that businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers, and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their efforts.

What exactly is holding us back from this success, and how do we transcend our differences?

Enough with all the finger-pointing 

With today’s expectations for 2X+ annual growth, it’s difficult for sales teams to meet their goals through pure outbound methods (cold calls and emails, industry events). As a result, sales relies more on inbound leads generated by marketing from content, email, and social media marketing, as well as advertising.

At the same time, marketers have taken on deeper revenue goals and are relying on salespeople to aggressively pursue leads.

This set-up unfortunately makes it easy to point fingers when the revenue needle isn’t moving. Each side will scramble to confirm their biases. Sales will point to the small percentage of low-quality leads from marketing, while marketing points to the poor follow-up on marketing leads by the sales team.

Both sides are now cherry-picking situations that make each other look bad. Ugh.

This type of low-level finger-pointing is fairly common, but you need to avoid it like the plague. If it’s happening in your organization, you’ve already lost the plot. Sales and marketing are no longer even collaborating and now it’s time for an all-hands-on-deck meeting.

Don’t wait for a downturn to make repairs

A good way to avoid descending into passive-aggressive finger-pointing is to resolve sales and marketing conflicts when things are going well within the company. When people are on the same team, cheering and celebrating.  

I’ll admit, it’s unnatural to tackle a problem when it doesn’t even feel like there’s a problem. When the company is crushing it, sales and marketing must be aligned, right? Well … not really. The relationship may feel good while everyone is high-fiving at a company offsite, but that doesn’t mean the relationship is good.

Those record revenues may just be the result of a humming economy. Whatever the reason, the good times are the exact time for sales and marketing to come up with a sustainability plan. To have the hard conversations. To make it last. 

Both sides are hitting goals and the relationship is not under a microscope. THIS is the time to figure out which parts of the sales/marketing strategy are sub-optimal and fix them.

It will be 10-times harder to do this when the company takes a bad turn because of the additional stress. And you’ll quickly find yourself two years behind on critical business goals that were ignored.

For instance, that low bar you placed on MQLs (marketing qualified leads) that you got away with in good times now shines as a big problem as the company struggles. Come up with an MQL-adjustment plan now even if the business doesn’t depend on it now. 

Also, when things are going well, teams don’t have to have difficult conversations and never learn how to communicate during stressful times. Set the bar higher and force some of those difficult conversations during good times so that you know how to work together if things go south.

Meet consistently, bring in a third party if necessary

With so much at stake, every organization must do what it takes to keep sales and marketing collaborating effectively.

If the sales/marketing relationship is so frayed that it can’t be rectified internally, it may require a third party. You could bring in an external consultancy that has worked in both sales and marketing and understands how to pinpoint common conflicts and resolve them.

Metadata customers get a special dose of the sales and marketing relationship medicine with they start working with us. In our initial strategy intake meeting, we ask the director of marketing and a director from sales to attend so we can have the hard conversations about lead scoring, handoff strategies, the metrics we should all be monitoring, and the accounts and prospects we should be targeting. 

These customer sales and marketing meetings have uncovered some big problems that were relatively simple to fix. For example, cracking open a lead scoring model and getting everyone to agree that a lead who filled out a form for a “Top 10 Tips” whitepaper probably isn’t ready for a demo is not hard. The conversation just needs to be had, not avoided. 

Sales and marketing have been an odd couple long enough. We have it in us to be a power couple. When we join forces, the payoff in terms of revenue and customer satisfaction is too huge to ignore. 

San Francisco, CA, Feb 4, 2021 — metadata.io, the autonomous demand generation platform, today announced it was named in the top leadership position in the G2 Winter 2021 Momentum Grid® Report for Account-Based Advertising Software.

This continues the recent accolades for the company, moving up since last year’s report and being named in several Summer 2020 reports as a leader or high performer. In 2020, Metadata announced a company first—a full sweep in the top leadership position in the G2 Fall 2020 Grid® Report for the Account-Based Advertising category, proving the ABM market is shifting to demand generation technologies.

The Momentum Grid® scores are calculated by a proprietary G2 algorithm that factors in social, web, employee, and review data that G2 has deemed influential in a company’s momentum. The ranking provides benchmarks for product comparison and market trend analysis. Badges are awarded to products with the top Momentum Grid® scores. Products included in the Momentum Grid® have received a minimum of 10 reviews. The Momentum Grid® for Account-Based Advertising was based on scores calculated using the G2 Satisfaction algorithm v3.0 and the G2 Momentum algorithm v1.0 from reviews collected through November 2020.

“We are thankful to our wonderful customers, as they attribute to our growth and tidal change in the industry, in which vanity metrics matter less, and tangible demand and pipeline that translates to revenue, matter most”, says Gil Allouche, Founder & CEO at Metadata.

Highest Satisfaction Scores against Competitors

“We are honored to rank again as #1 in customer satisfaction against the competition. This leadership spot in another comprehensive report from G2 is a key indicator that the ABM market is shifting towards wholesome demand generation technologies.”

G2 Crowd’s Grid is based on real, unbiased user reviews and rates platforms algorithmically from product reviews shared by G2 Crowd users and data aggregated from online sources and social networks. Comments in reviews include:

• “Metadata streamlines work that would usually take hours into minutes.”
• “Metadata changed the way we ran demand-gen (for the better!)”
• “The performance of the platform..we are able to segment and target audiences that we never could without it. We have seen our CPLs drop by 40 percent in some cases and we are just getting started.”
• “This really puts demand-gen on autopilot, all we have to worry about is the strategy and creative. The platform makes it dead simple to spin up campaigns super fast.”
• “The platform makes it super simple to push campaigns in the market super fast. Once launched, you start seeing results in a few days or less – favorable CPL in region-specific and super easy to browse through experiments and see which are most effective.”

“As Account-based advertising continues to evolve, we are seeing the growth in the industry and new ways to target,” said Emily Malis, Manager, Market Research at G2. “Metadata is again leading the way, as #1 across the grid in overall Satisfaction in G2’s Winter 2021 Grid Report. In G2’s Winter 2021 Momentum Report for Account-Based Advertising, Metadata received an overall high customer satisfaction score, reiterating how happy its customers are with the platform. The high ratings are a signal that they embrace the product and the ways they can leverage its features as part of their account-based strategies.”

Metadata’s autonomous demand generation software is a massive advantage for marketing teams as it sets the entire martech stack on autopilot by connecting existing tools and putting them to work. Demand marketers from companies like Zoom, Pendo, Udacity, and Vonage have experienced as much as a 4.5X ROI in as little as 90 days using Metadata. Metadata’s rapidly growing customer base continues to praise the technology for helping achieve B2B marketing results beyond the scale and scope they previously thought possible.