If you're building your own ABM platform, KickFire is a must-have!
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used KickFire for website de-anonymization. For lead gen teams, it gets very difficult to act on website activity for uncookied visitors. KickFire captures the IP address of the visitors and matches it against public IP indexes to return the visitor's company name. We used the Google Analytics integration to create custom dimensions and audiences, received daily reports, identified new target accounts from de-anonymized website visits, made watch lists for our sales team's named accounts, and even tracked click paths by company. KickFire was a crucial part of our proof-of-concept process as we moved to a 100% account-based sales and marketing model. We only moved away from KickFire now that we have moved to a full-stack ABM platform.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- KickFire doesn't filter the de-anonymized website visit results much for accuracy. Public IP indexes are far from perfect. Companies change their IPs all the time. Other solutions check each website visit against several indexes and only deliver de-anonymized visits to the client when they are able to reach a certain confidence level in the company identification. KickFire instead does less filtering and lets the client handle it on their own. The downside is that there are more false positives. In our experience, there were a few companies that started showing that they were visiting our site several times a day, visiting just about every page. Later we realized that the company was an ISP/VPN provider (one of the largest in the UK) and that the visitors were actually probably from a number of other companies--they were just using the VPN. Again, this is a con because it gives more work to you in the end. On the other hand, the approach that other solutions take means you miss out on significant website activity because it didn't reach a certain confidence score.
Likelihood to Recommend
While it's true that the accuracy is an issue, and you have to take the visits with a certain "grain of salt", the platform works really well. I love the immediate alerts, the daily insight reports, and Google Analytics integration. The Salesforce integration is pretty good too. If you are building your own ABM model (instead of going with a full-stack provider like 6sense, Demandbase, Engagio, etc.), KickFire is a must-have.
