Fliptop to marketers: Here are the companies you want to know

How embarrassing to pitch a new company only to find out later it’s already in your pipeline.

That’s a key problem predictive lead scorer Fliptop hopes to solve with its announcement today of an “account-based marketing” solution.

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Account-based marketing is a time-worn B2B marketing phrase, where targeting is aimed at a group of decision-makers in a prospective customer company. The idea is that many purchasing decisions are group decisions, so targeting an individual is only part of the battle.

The term is now being reinvigorated because of new tools that enable, for instance, real-time ad targeting at identified companies by their IP address(es), company-targeted landing pages, and company-based tracking through a marketing suite.

Fliptop’s announcement is intended to position the company as the provider of one key piece in the growing account-based marketing ecosystem — a filtered list of accounts to target beyond the ones you’ve already sold to or that are already in your Salesforce.

Like B2B competitors Infer and Lattice Engines, San Francisco-based Fliptop is focused on predictive lead scoring to determine which customers or prospects are more likely to respond to specific pitches.

Fliptop CEO Doug Camplejohn noted that all three companies “launched predictive products in the last year” in part because of the “explosion of public data” and other data sources that could be made available through the cloud.

All three companies, he told VentureBeat, pull out a company’s data from its systems, “mash it up with public data, and build a model about whether a lead becomes a prospect or a customer.”

But then marketers ask, what are the next accounts to go after? Currently, Camplejohn said, marketers engage in a “very manual, time-consuming process” to answer that question, because it involves assessing lots of companies that are not in the system.

Previously, he said, Fliptop focused on lead scoring predictions for individuals in companies that were current customers or that were in the marketer’s Salesforce, and then building a model on that. Now, its account-based marketing approach is targeting “the total available market of companies,” Camplejohn said, with a customized list that Fliptop describes as the “YourCompany 1000.”

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“We’re rolling out the first automatically-generated list” with a focus on not-yet-considered companies, he said, resulting in about 1,000 to 2,000 companies ranked in order, minus the ones the marketer has already sold to or that are in the pipeline.

The targeted list, which can be exported to Excel or Salesforce, is generated from “hundreds of signals” that indicate a company is an appropriate target, he said, such as a recent office move indicating a need for office equipment or supplies.

To scoop up a large universe of companies, Fliptop has partnered with InsideView to add 11 million companies to its scope. Once the company has been located, the marketer can use ZoomInfo or other companies to find contacts, for instance, or DemandBase to target ads.