DemandScience vs. Ion Interactive vs. KickFire

Demand Science did deliver the quantity of leads without issue. The data for a few was not accurate (bounced when following up). But they agreed to make good by providing substitute leads to meet the quota. Towards the end of my project, they lost a few folks, and so the end of my campaign got a little rough as they were taking over some assignments midway. But we ultimately completed the SOW. I will say that the leads did not perform well in our email cadence - none converted. However, this was a test of the concept for us. Content syndication had a lower cost per qualified lead than some other tactics, so we tested it. Your results may vary, based on your follow-up and your market.

Incentivized

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

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For small businesses that don't have big budgets for marketing automation, VisiStat is an ideal first step. For companies that have sophisticated systems in place, VisiStat will augment your analytics and provide a deeper dive into your website activity. Since the implementation involves adding javascript to your site, the user should be familiar with how to do this

Incentivized

• The initial pitch and contact from Mason used "show me you know me" well, which we felt was a good sign of company culture and approach to database marketing.
• Delivery of leads was ahead of schedule.
• They set expectations, and then delivered what they said they would.
• The leads matched our criteria as agreed.
• Regular check ins and catch ups, and patience when thing were taking a bit of time to get sorted here.

Incentivized

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

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• De-anonymizes website activity at the account (company) level.
• Identifies net new target accounts.
• Displays click path, time on page, time per session, and engagement level of each de-anonymized website visit.
• Gives great daily insight on watchlists you've set up.
• Delivers every possible de-anonymized visit with little filtering for accuracy.
• More on the watchlists. I really love that you can receive immediate alerts on website visits from accounts you've listed on your watchlists. This way, you never miss the window of opportunity to reach out to your key targets while they are currently on your site.
• Salesforce integration is good. KickFire pushes most recent website visits, pages visited, website click path, activity percent change, and more to the given account in Salesforce. You can then create reports and run them regularly to see which accounts are surging in website activity. This is also great for account prospecting, and for planning your sales outreach plan of attack. You can see which bits of your website content are most interesting to the company, and which products they are most interested in.

Incentivized

• We would like to see more proactive communication on what's working and what's not without requiring a meeting - regular reporting cadence to assess asset quality
• A dashboard view might be nice as well, again, so we can look at an asset and see how it's performing (or if it isn't) without having to wait on a rep to pull a report or schedule a walkthrough

Incentivized

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

• Some outdated information and your credits will be used
• Credit package sizes are not very customizable
• A tad pricy comapred to simillar prospecting tools I've seen

Incentivized

Our executives decided to not renew because we were not seeing the ROI they were looking for. However, our executives did not make the best decisions on the data Demand Science provided.

Incentivized

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

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We've been happy customers of VisiStat for many years. I've used the service at multiple companies and you can't beat it.

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The leads were pretty straight forward. However, their appointment setting did not integrate well into our system and many of the meetings didn't occur. I had to chase a lot of prospects and many times Demand Science didn't provide direct dials.

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

It was designed for people who are business users, not tech users.

Incentivized

We've never had any outages in the 7+ years using the system.

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Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

The system is very responsive, and when there are times in which data is loading, the VisiStat system provides humorous loading messages.

Incentivized

Our rep is always available and quickly responds to any question we have. I haven't worked with other partners who are as proactive and excited to help us as our DemandScience rep is. He reaches out with new ideas and suggestions frequently. They are happy to make any changes needed to the campaigns and make those changes quickly and efficiently. They work well with our execution agency, but are also happy to meet with us directly to provide insights and support.

Incentivized

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

They are very good at solving cases that I bring to them. I'd like to see more proactive support to make sure we are getting the full value out of the solution.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

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The tutorials are very good and they explain how to get started using the system. The online webinars are very good for advancing your knowledge of the product.

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They did extremely well. However, our executives did a poor job in defining our ICP so we didn't get the maximum benefit out of it.

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There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

Don't hesitate to contact VisiStat support. They are extremely helpful.

Incentivized

I've not used another content syndication company, and I probably won't after the lack of results we've had. I have used direct email organizations, and they are stronger but also more expensive, so you have to weigh your priorities. I could see if you were selling a specific product or software and how this could be beneficial, but I'd steer away from it for services.

Incentivized

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

I covered this pretty extensively in the cons. The key differentiator here is that KickFire serves up almost all the data (or so it seems) to the end client. The client then has to do their own work on interpreting it. This is good because it means we don't miss out on any website activities, but it's bad because we get a lot of false positives. 6sense uses the confidence score approach I mentioned in the Cons section, which means the match rates of the data we get are much higher. Our experience with Clearbit comes from other tools that are built on it (Bombora, Drift, etc.), and it has not been great. We've seen many more inaccuracies with Clearbit.

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Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

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We've gone from a few thousand unique visitors per month to nearly 200,000 unique visitors. VisiStat doesn't miss a beat.

Incentivized

• We have been able to grow our lead numbers with high quality leads at a reasonable cost
• We have been able to generate just the leads we want to support our Business Development team
• We have been able to get our content in front of our specific TAL

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized

• Faster lead conversion
• Less time on LinkedIn trying to figure out DM (decision maker)
• Increased employee efficiency

Incentivized