It’s not easy being a marketer in the business-to-business world. Whereas effectively promoting a consumer product only necessities an understanding of the major demographic groups that make up a brand’s customer base, achieving the same success in the corporate world requires knowing the specific needs of every single target organization. Private equity heavyweight Sequoia Capital this week invested $15 million into a startup called Mintigo Inc. that promises to make the task much easier with its cloud-based analytics service.

The aptly-named Predictive Marketing Platform works its magic using a massive trove of information about some 15 million companies and 200 million workers that the outfit has collected from various external sources. According to Mintigo’s website, the analytics algorithms included in its service dig into the dataset to find key details about a business-facing organization’s top customers and connect the dots to identify what sets them apart from the crowd. The results are used as a sort of benchmark against which new leads are compared to assess their buying behavior.

Users can harness the functionality to distinguish the prospects who are most likely to be won over by their organization’s sales pitch, find the best way to present the message and then look for any cross-selling opportunities that may arise during the deal-making stage. The ability to perform the entire process through a unified interface removes the need for the tedious manual research that has historically been required to gain such a thorough understanding of a lead, which adds up to a lot of saved time for marketers. And the larger the organization, the bigger the productivity gain becomes.

Equinix Inc., Oracle Corp. and Red Hat Inc. are among the major vendors that are using Mintigo’s service to help their marketers work more efficiently. All three came aboard last year, which was one of the bests period for the startup since its incorporation in 2009: The outfit claims to have seen both its revenue and platform usage increase 700 percent, momentum that the new funding from Sequoia is meant to help maintain. The investment shows that even though venture capital firms have gotten cautious in recent quarters due to the unstable global economic climate, it’s still more than possible to secure financing with a solid value proposition and demonstrable growth potential.

Image via Pixabay