Product Updates

Terminus’ Acquisition of BrightFunnel: The Details

Terminus BrightFunnel Acquisition

Today, I’m fired up to tell the world about a major step forward for our customers and all B2B marketers! Terminus has acquired BrightFunnel, the pioneer in B2B marketing analytics and attribution. This combination ties together marketing execution with measurement.

Our Journey to Joining Terminus and BrightFunnel

At Terminus, our vision is to unify the go-to-market teams of every B2B company in the world, and our team of “Terminators” is committed to pouring every ounce of energy into helping our customers achieve this vision and solve their greatest business challenges.

To this end, we launched our account-based advertising product in 2015 and started building #FlipMyFunnel, a thriving community around the practice of account-based marketing (ABM). ABM unites the go-to-market team around orchestrating their engagement with key people in target accounts, which leads to efficient growth and exceptional buying experiences.

We’ve witnessed this first-hand as we conducted our own account-based marketing transformation internally. In mid-2017, we completely reworked the way we practice ABM at Terminus and dramatically improved the way our team works together.

We implemented new marketing technology, restructured our processes across sales and marketing to optimize for account conversion, and executed on every go-to-market effort as a unified revenue team. We call it our #OneTeam ABM transformation.

#OneTeam Terminus ABM transformation

Since beginning our ABM transformation, we’ve seen phenomenal results.

  • 2X conversion of accounts from first meeting to closed-won customers! That’s right — today our pipeline is more than twice as valuable as it was six months ago.
  • 20% increase in average selling price
  • Shortened average sales cycle by 20 days

Many factors went into this success. We started targeting better accounts, executing smarter account-based advertising campaigns with our own product, and getting more personalized with outreach to our target personas. But none of it would have been possible without the ability to see what was working and what was not. We needed to know how engaged our target accounts were and what was actually impacting revenue.

A lesson we learned was that our own product for executing account-based marketing is best paired with powerful tools for measurement and attribution. Six months ago, we didn’t have a way to effectively measure marketing’s impact throughout the funnel. That needed to change, so we began looking for an effective way to better understand account journeys and measure channel and campaign performance.

After evaluating and working with a few different vendors, it became clear that BrightFunnel’s product is far superior to everything else in the market for this purpose. Today, BrightFunnel has become a core component of our marketing stack and is relied upon daily throughout our organization.

And now, BrightFunnel is part of the Terminus solution! With this acquisition, we are addressing one of the top challenges our customers face — one that we faced before our own #OneTeam ABM transformation: how to attribute, measure, and optimize revenue across every marketing and sales channel, campaign, and initiative, including account-based marketing and advertising.

Why Bring Terminus and BrightFunnel Together

Together, Terminus and BrightFunnel deliver best-in-class account-based execution and B2B analytics for today’s unified revenue team. By combining our solutions, we will help marketers and their partners across the go-to-market team to:

  • Close the loop on measuring account-based marketing and advertising.
  • Understand the influence of campaigns throughout the buyer’s journey.
  • Create a 360-degree view of engagement that supports one revenue team.

From day one, the core of the Terminus product has been account-based advertising and funnel progression reporting. Terminus is hands-down the best way to accurately target accounts with precise, tailored, and personalized ads that increase engagement and accelerate pipeline. Terminus is the #1-rated account-based execution software on G2 Crowd, and feedback from marketers indicates nothing else on the market even comes close.

BrightFunnel is a powerful platform for connecting marketing efforts to revenue through best-in-class B2B analytics, including AI-powered multi-touch attribution, account-based measurement, and revenue funnel analytics. As a result, BrightFunnel gives go-to-market teams unprecedented visibility into the influence that all online and offline activity has on revenue, and it allows marketers to drill down to account-level reporting through its ABM module.

Together, the combined powers of Terminus and BrightFunnel will help customers work as #OneTeam to execute their go-to-market initiatives, whether they are account-based or a mix of ABM and inbound.

Now, as we move forward as one team and one solution, we are excited about how much value we will deliver to our customers. Acquiring BrightFunnel has accelerated our product vision by nearly 24 months!

[ctt template=”1″ link=”1NW5K” via=”yes” ]”Acquiring @BrightFunnel has accelerated our product vision by nearly 24 months!” @ericspett” [/ctt]Two Incredible Teams

As I got to know the CEO of BrightFunnel, Chris Mann, and his team, it became clear that we share the same vision for the future of B2B marketing. And our teams are an incredible culture fit!

At Terminus, #OneTeam has come to represent how we think and act. It is the #OneTeam collaboration that has helped us innovate quickly and crush our goals in 2017. We see that same attitude in the BrightFunnel team. They are passionate and mission-driven team players who clearly care deeply about each other and their customers. They are just all-around awesome people!

Now, Terminus is proud to welcome nearly 40 new Terminators to our San Francisco office, and I’m pleased to share that our teams have become “fast friends,” unified by the passion and drive to help B2B marketers win big. In total, we now have more more than 150 “Terminators” that work relentlessly to help our customers. This team will help us continue to build the incredibly strong customer relationships, product, and culture that we have focused on since Terminus was founded.

If you are just learning about Terminus, we have been on an incredible growth trajectory on a number of levels. We were recently recognized as Atlanta’s fastest-growing software company. We were named one of the Top 50 Best Workplaces in America by Inc. Magazine, the #1 Best Place to Work by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, and #1 in Employee Appreciation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Additionally, Sangram Vajre, CMO and fellow co-founder of Terminus, has spearheaded the ABM community’s growth through the #FlipMyFunnel movement and by authoring the first-ever book on ABM.

Building a Platform that Unites Go-to-Market Teams

This acquisition is a huge step toward building out the B2B platform that supports our vision.

We now have the following best-in-class capabilities for our customers.

  • Account-based advertising that enables the most targeted, accurate, and high-quality ads. Nothing else comes close.
  • AI-powered multi-touch attribution to measure influence and impact of marketing through the buyer’s journey.
  • B2B and account-based reporting and analytics that provide a 360-degree view of the entire customer journey from account engagement to revenue.
  • Account-based web analytics — Account-Based Visitor ID powered by our B2B Account Graph — that provides detailed insight into which accounts are engaged with your online content.
  • Account-based intent, powered by Bombora, for understanding which accounts are actively in-market for a solution like yours.
  • Account-based digital orchestration that makes pulling the levers of account-based advertising easy and effective for marketers through integrations with Salesforce and Hubspot. We will soon be announcing even broader features and partnerships to help our customers in this area.

Since our $10.3 million Series B round in May 2017, we have invested significantly in our engineering team to build out our platform. With the acquisition of BrightFunnel, we will add more engineers to support our vision of making marketing analytics and attribution more accessible to all B2B teams and more focused on account-based practices.

Entering 2018 with a Bang!

With the help of our customers, partners, friends, and teammates, we have had an incredible 2017 to build from.

  • We have achieved more than 200% revenue growth and now have more than 500 customers and 150 “Terminators.”
  • We’ve had incredible success with our own #OneTeam transformation to achieve growth that is powered by ABM!
  • We introduced significant new capabilities, such as Account-Based Visitor ID web analytics, our Hubspot integration, and Bombora Company Surge intent data.
  • And now, we have acquired BrightFunnel to add analytics and attribution to complement account-based execution in our solution

On behalf of the Terminators, we could not be more grateful for the amazing group of customers, partners, investors, advisors, and friends that surrounds our business. We are so excited for what is to come in 2018 and look forward to serving you in every way that we can. Our team is committed to giving everything we’ve got to helping you solve your biggest challenges. Cheers to your success in 2018 and beyond!

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