Company Background

Artesian Solutions is a UK based vendor that has been founded a couple of years ago by a highly experienced team with a deep knowledge of the CRM and business intelligence industries. Their company track record includes various important nominations, e.g. one of the UK’s Most Influential Enterprise 2.0 Companies in 2009, Gartner Cool Vendor 2010, and amongst Europe´s Most Promising Start-Ups in the Telegraph´s Start-Up in 2011.

Market

The business problem Artesian is addressing is the provision of accurate and relevant information for B2B sales, marketing and account managers, in order to support a customer centric selling and service approach. Their main objective is to provide personalized, filtered sales intelligence from social media to B2B sales people - very well thought, very useful and very effective. In times of information overload, anytime – anywhere and social revolution Artesian targets the segment of large enterprises that are obliged to short term performance and a “getting things done” corporate culture. It definitely is the right segment to sell to. Current customers include for instance 4 of the top 5 UK banks. So far 6500 seats of their tool have been sold.

Product

Artesian’s product provides the right information at the right time to the right user (subscriptions are personalized; salesperson gets email in the morning with essentials):

• Find conversations
• Understand the context
• Organize and index results
• Rank for each user
• Socialize for action

Easy to understand, making a B2B sales mgrs life easier, improving sales productivity (if the salesperson at the end is able to convert the information provided into real opportunities during the sales conversation).

There are competitors who provide similar functionality, but focused on B2C. Artesian convinces with its NLP-based approach to filtering and personalization. What also makes them different is the combination of keyword matching, taxonomy analysis and adding real-time ranking heuristics. Intelligent filtering of external content based on their understanding of the salesperson's need reduces the information overload that we find in the digital world. Using Artesian is all about “getting to know” across channels – companies, people, markets, competitors, customer´s customers, customer´s competitors. The user experience is nicely designed and easy to follow.

Their solution can be integrated as add-on to any traditional CRM suites. During the demo they have shown us integration with Salesforce.com (see figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Watchlist alert integrated into Salesforce

Figure 2: Individual analysis results integrated into Salesforce

Artesian is positioned as a social intelligence platform for marketing surveillance that reaches both marketing and sales professionals.

B2B sales professionals using Artesian actually should not fail – the power the tool gives you by distilling and contextualizing big amounts of data and provide you with the exact input you need is quite impressive.

Vision

Artesian defines its vision in a compelling and convincing way: “to change the way B2B employees engage with other business customers, for the better, forever. The end of cold calling.” Their plans for the future are to continuously work on product enhancements to keep their strategic positioning in their target segment. Funds for product innovation have been raised in the recent past, and they have structured their roadmap (whose details are kept confidential) in a very structured way.

Final Thoughts

Throughout the whole presentation Artesian impressed us with their professionalism, creativity, executive moderation skills and passion they have for their product and customers. The proof for the last are the references customers would give them. Just to mention one: “Artesian provides us with relevant, timely sales intelligence about a customer that provides a salesperson with the practical insight they need, whether they are contacting a prospect for the first time or in the process of closing a deal. We identified and closed over $300K of business in our first month of using Artesian.” They are very well prepared for the future, and they have the right people on board to fulfill their ambitious company goals.

Reviewed by CRM Idol 2012 Primary Judges