"Alexa, Help Me Sell Advertising Today"

NEW YORK, March 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Is there anything that voice robots can't do?

Today, in a live demonstration at the Borrell Local Advertising Conference in New York, two SMB data companies unveiled a new application to allow sales reps to access valuable SMB data via voice-activated assistants, such as Alexa.

Running out the door for a sales call and need to find out whether a local business is advertising online and where they're running their digital ads?  No problem, just ask your voice assistant.

Want to learn how much local furniture stores in Columbus, Ohio spend on digital advertising? Simply ask your questions and the customized data is delivered by the voice robot, sent to your email and even logged in your Salesforce account.

"It's only the first iteration, but it could wind up being a game changer for hyper-busy sales reps," said Gordon Borrell while introducing the new service in front of several hundred media and tech executives in New York City this morning. "Think of it as a rep's robot assistants."

The application is the result of a partnership between BuzzBoard, a data science startup out of San Francisco and Borrell Associates, the leader in tracking and forecasting local marketing expenditures.

As part of the strategic alliance, Borrell's local spending data is now integrated within BuzzBoard's sales platform which analyzes more than 6,000 data signals to assess a business digital health. This collaboration makes these insights available to more than 10,000 salespeople across 1,000+ companies, powering the data-driven conversations they have daily with prospects and customers.

"We're excited to connect Borrell's premium data with ours and provide sales professionals with more context and impact," said Umesh Tibrewal, CEO of BuzzBoard.  "There's no better way for sellers to help SMBs make more informed decisions about their advertising and marketing investments than by using objective, data-driven insights. We expect the quality of the buying conversations to improve dramatically."

Sales professionals will use the Borrell data in the field to help SMBs benchmark against similar local businesses spending annually on marketing and advertising activities, and where they are spending it. This will fuel more meaningful conversations and enable sellers to better position their solutions to help local SMBs be more competitive and grow their businesses.

Borrell will deliver a portion of its local category data with BuzzBoard in a two-tiered arrangement.  The first tier, available to shared customers of both Borrell and BuzzBoard, provides a granular view of local category data, including average advertising and digital marketing expenditures for local companies, year-over-year spending trends across all digital and non-digital advertising channels, and a detailed breakdown of marketing services spending, including company averages, within each local market.  The second tier, available to those BuzzBoard customers who are not Borrell subscribers, contains total advertising and digital marketing services budgets by both category and local market without the granular view.  Those BuzzBoard customers interested in obtaining the more granular, first-tier data can contact Borrell directly through the BuzzBoard platform via a form-fill.   

"What's particularly exciting about this partnership is that the data we normally provide to the C Suite to influence strategy is now going to be used to activate digital sellers in local markets," said Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates.  "This will help them better identify and size the ad budgets of customers and prospective customers, and give them more influence in their one-on-one conversations with them."  

Borrell's local category data is now live for BuzzBoard customers.

About BuzzBoard
BuzzBoard uncovers data-driven insights about SMBs that drive more meaningful conversations for marketers and sellers, resulting in increased sales across the customer lifecycle. By applying data science and digital signals to the world's most extensive collection of business intelligence about SMBs, BuzzBoard answers the most important question for marketers and sellers: why will my prospects and customers want to engage? BuzzBoard transforms unproductive sales interactions into customized opportunities to improve customer engagement, book more appointments and close deals faster. BuzzBoard is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, please visit www.buzzboard.com.

About Borrell Associates
Borrell Associates is a data-driven company that maintains an interactive database of marketing expenditures for every business in the U.S. and Canadian market down to the county or province level.  Founded in 2001, Borrell has become the leader in tracking and forecasting local advertising and marketing expenditures.  The company runs the largest survey of local SMBs in North America, maintains a database of digital ad revenue for more than 10,000 local companies, and publishes regular insights on its findings.  More than 3,000 customers access Borrell's data, which can be seen at adspending.com.   Additional information about Borrell is available at www.borrellassociates.com.

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE BuzzBoard