Demandbase has announced that it will add a Workspaces capability to its platform. Workspaces will enable organisations to add account partitions for their business units to keep data and activities separate, allowing those business units to focus on the B2B sales that matter to them. The feature will give sales teams greater focus, save time, reduce confusion and strengthen security and data privacy by showing only relevant data to the specific business units.
Enterprise Times recently spoke with Jon Miller, CMO at Demandbase, in an interview that will be published over the next few days. He likened the feature to one that he oversaw the release of at Marketo, where he was a co-founder and CMO.
Miller commented, “What it does is it lets you partition both your data and all the objects in the system into role-based groups. It lets a global company have the EMEA team, only see EMEA data and the EMEA campaigns and the EMEA segments, and North America sees their own stuff. Then if you have a global centre of excellence, they can see everything. They can push templates out to different regions. It was a super important feature at Marketo to unlock very complex, large enterprises that want to roll this out globally.”
Enterprise Times asked Miller whether the feature would look beyond a split by geographical location to a split by a functional or divisional factor?
Miller answered, “It certainly can be configured that way. If you have one team that focuses on selling product X and another on selling product Y, you could slice it that way. The reason I use the Geo one is just from my Marketo experience; that’s the way most people set it up.”
What Workspaces enable
Workspaces are only available to Alpha customers, and general availability is planned for H1 2023. This early announcement should start the conversations with customers to understand whether the requirements are still similar to that envisioned by the existing team. The screenshot below is a mock-up of the solution, but the early adopters are already enthusiastic.
Pascal Liebart, data center marketing director at AMD, commented, “At AMD, our diverse product portfolio means we might have distinct opportunities with an account across various business units. Previously, we were unable to differentiate signals across segments, so we couldn’t get the most out of the Demandbase platform. With this new release, we can better configure our instance, resulting in clearer indicators and a more agile sales enablement process.”
More to Workspaces than at first appears
What will be interesting to see is what emerges within the functional improvement, which Demandbase currently states will be available at no additional charge. That decision may change depending on the additional requirements it discovers during the alpha and beta testing process.
Demandbase appears to be building far more capability than just a split by Geo or to a specific business unit. The intent is to enable organisations to partition the data so that teams can only work with the data assigned to them. For some large organisations, this may allow them to build Chinese walls between competitive accounts. Or, perhaps they can separate sensitive accounts or ones that require a high degree of security.
Workspaces will also control the creation of lists, filters, and reports. Each Workspace will also be able to have “intent” configured for just that Workspace. It will enable Demandbase users to differentiate between different industries, or the public and private sector, further nuancing their approach. While users can work within their Workspaces, admins and managers will have wider visibility.
Brewster Stanislaw, chief product officer at Demandbase, commented, “Large enterprises have complex solution portfolios that leverage different go-to-market motions. To manage this complexity and ensure data privacy and security, they need flexible technology solutions that adapt to their businesses.
“Workspaces does exactly this by allowing them to containerize their data to ensure only the relevant teams have access. Demandbase is the only GTM platform that supports true data containerization for business units and product lines. We know how important this is to our enterprise customers and we’re excited to deliver this enhanced flexibility and continued innovation for them.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Workspaces are a work in progress, and in making the announcement, Demandbase is building an excitement and anticipation level within its client base. Full technical details are not available yet and will be available at general availability. The announcement raises more questions than it answers, and the potential for Workspaces to focus buying groups is huge.
There are a lot of questions that will no doubt be answered in 2023 about the new feature. Can users belong to more than a single workspace? Will Workspaces support data sovereignty? This could be important for those organisations looking to sell to the public sector. Can a Workspace be configured for individual accounts? What reporting will Demandbase create that compares the different Workspaces? Will this include metrics to see how different segments are performing?
Additionally, how easy will these Workspaces be to administrate and what tools will administrators have to hand. When asked how Workspaces are implemented, Demandbase answered, “Admins will need to go into Settings to configure the workspace starting with configuring data rules for what gets assigned, assigning users to the workspace and then assigning assets to the workspace.” They may need to create more functionality around this as organisations create multiple Workspaces.
This is a tantalising taste of just one of the new features Demandbase is looking to roll out in 2023. Miller also revealed some of the other plans in action. As Demandbase looks to extend its leadership in the ABM software sector and extend into other areas, this is a flag in the ground that cements its claim.
