Dun & Bradstreet revs up for the new B2B environment with ‘ABX’ platform

Dun & Bradstreet has been in the business intelligence business for some 90 years, and the D-U-N-S number, a unique identifier assigned to hundreds of millions of business worldwide, has been around almost 60 years. But it’s never too late for a refresh, and last month it launched D&B Rev.Up ABX which it’s branding as a “revtech” go-to-market platform.

Rev.Up ABX combines a CDP with first- and third-party data activation and analytics capabilities, together with collaborations with Bombora and Folloze; the former bringing intent data based on a taxonomy of some 7,000 intent topics, the latter enabling the launch of personalized experiences across channels. ABX, which stands for account-based experience, is a term we’re seeing with more frequency, even if it’s not yet a generally recognized category.

It’s quite a makeover for the veteran BI vendor. We spoke to D&B CMO Stacy Greiner to see if we were overestimating the significance of the changes.

The fragmented martech/salestech landscape. “Your impression is correct,” she confirmed. “This is building on our historic strength and our customers trusting us for contact and account data. As we look at how we can continue to provide more value and be a better partner for our customers, there’s a focus on making it easier for teams to make data-driven decisions.”

It’s been a challenge for sales and marketing teams to get visibility into the data and make those data-driven decisions, she said, because of how fragmented the salestech and martech spaces are. “This is why we have a point of view around revenue tech, one go-to-market motion where sales and marketing are collaborating throughout. The Rev.Up ABX platform can be the foundation now for all these hyper-fragmented tools, so that you can have one source of truth and activate a consistent buyer journey across all the tools you’re using.”

Underlying this is the recognition that B2B buyers are looking — more now than ever — for digital buying experiences. “You’ve got all these little pockets of siloed data,” she said, “Different teams are using different tools. As a buyer, you’re expecting a brand to be providing you an efficient, personalized journey through digital channels, but when all of these teams and tools are operating in siloes it can very disjointed.”

D&B had acquired the independent CDP Lattice Engines back in July 2019. It’s now at the core of the Rev.Up offering. It ingests first- and third-party data from D&B customers, and allows the modeling of audiences — contacts or accounts — which can then be syndicated to programmatic, paid search, paid social, email, and sales channels.

Revving up RevOps Rev.Up, of course, calls to mind RevOps, the strategy of combining sales, marketing and often customer success ops into one team. “Once these teams are all working as one team, and from one set of truths about accounts and contacts, whether they’re customer or prospects, that’s truly when teams can deliver that personalized buying experience through all the different digital channels.”

Does the Rev.Up ABX platform offering anything to D&B customers that already have an ABM solution in place? “ABM is a motion that marketing and sales teams use, but there are also motions all marketing and sales teams run that are really more attribute-based — here’s the types of businesses and people I want to do business with — and they’ll use different activation tools to run and manage those campaigns. Rev.Up ABX is one foundation that allows you to use the tech investment you’ve made from an activation perspective, but have all your data in one place to that you’re managing it in a coordinated fashion across those tools.”

Why we care. The pendulum is swinging away from point solutions and towards broader offerings which can orchestrate these critical digital journeys — but not necessarily towards the big, comprehensive CX suites. D&B’s Rev.Up ABX platform (and Demandbase started using the term “ABX” very recently) presents itself as more of a hub which can integrate existing activation solutions as well as integrating data from a wide range of sources. And it’s a logical step in many ways for a business steeped in account and contact data.