“How has the pandemic affected KickFire?”
“Have you changed your technology to adapt to our new normal?”
“How can you get company data if everyone is working remotely?”
We have heard these questions in some form or another on nearly every sales call since this pandemic started, and to be fair, they are all valid – I’d be asking the same thing.
Like many teams out there, we too have been trying to find harmony in the new normal of working from home, attending virtual events, home-schooling, and realizing that some of those “Student of the Month” bumper stickers are a lie.
So, how is KickFire adapting to the rise in remote work?
If you want the short answer:
- Nothing has changed. Our IP address intelligence™ technology was built with the ability to accurately identify the company behind remote/home office locations
- Changes to match rate were in single-digit-percentages and our algorithms quickly adapted bringing our match rates back to normal
- Our technology and data are the best in the industry.
Or, if you want to read more, here’s the TL/DR Version:
The impact of COVID-19 on IP address intelligence
After analyzing over six months of data, here are some top insights around our technology, promising data trends, and some key lessons learned so far. (if you want an in-depth look into how our technology actually works check out our first article).
Almost overnight, people's professional, personal, and leisure activities were (and still are) in large part confined to their homes. As the pandemic closed offices around the world, more people than ever were forced to shift their work activities into their “home offices.” In fact, according to a Gallup poll, roughly 68% of the current workforce is working at least partially, if not entirely, remote.
As expected, our initial analysis did report a slight dip in our global identification rates of about 5% across our B2B user base. This brief dip in match rates was caused by the flood of new signals feeding into our company identification algorithms from new home offices popping up all over the globe. But the fact is, people did not stop working, and our algorithms did not stop listening. Our technology was built to handle situations like this, and within a few weeks, they adapted to these new event signals, and our IP address intelligence regained its industry-leading match rates.
KickFire’s TWIN Satellites:
Being a Silicon Valley-based company, we have had a “work from home” ethos in our company culture, and what’s more, we built our technology taking into account that many other companies throughout the world would do the same. That’s why we built our TWIN Caching technology with a feature we call TWIN Satellites™, which allows us to deliver the same account level identification even while much of the business world is working from home.
Using our TWIN Satellite technology we are able to analyze event signals from company employees working remotely or from home offices and translate these signals into the account level data our customers depend on every day. When employees are in their home offices using various devices connected to the company network to browse the internet, these activities feed our algorithms and contribute to our IP match confidence score.
The impact on public data sources:
Unfortunately, vendors that rely solely on public IP databases for their company identification have been hit hard, really hard.
Here are the estimated match rates of public IP databases:
Why are these match rates so low?
As we discuss in our article on Public vs. Private IP Data, there is a multitude of reasons.
Because these public IP address vendors look at IP ranges instead of individual IP addresses and have little to no real “intelligence” behind their data, they are unable to look beyond the Internet Service Provider (ISP), so their match rates were already very low before the pandemic. However, now that many companies are mostly (if not entirely) working from home, this has virtually collapsed the already low match rates of reverse IP address providers – leaving them with no visibility into the companies behind these IP addresses.
Thankfully, KickFire does not rely on public IP address databases, in fact, we have a completely different approach when it comes to IP based company identification.
At KickFire, we understand the importance of not just taking an IP association at face value. Instead, we look deep into IP ranges and analyze every single IP address in existence. Furthermore, our TWIN Caching technology is able to look beyond the ISP level to identify companies of all sizes and even those inside IP ranges. This gives us the ability to identify more companies and provide a far more granular look at the real owner of an IP address.
In conclusion:
We are living in crazy times right now, and we’re continuing to evolve our technology in this changing environment. One of the best things we’ve learned so far is that our TWIN Caching technology is highly agile and adaptable, giving us the ability to identify remote offices and deliver valuable data to power ABM initiatives and more. We are excited to continue to provide B2B sales and marketing teams with meaningful account-level insights, beyond the ISP level to power their account-based sales and marketing strategies.
For more information about KickFire’s technology in the age of work from home, check out these related articles: