An unbiased review and benchmark of RB2B
RB2B has garnered significant attention after a public dispute with 6Sense.
Opinions are divided on who was right or wrong, with some accusing Adam Robinson from RB2B of using controversial tactics for attention, while others criticize 6Sense for allegedly bullying the smaller company.
A few of my marketer friends have privately expressed their concerns about sharing their experiences with 6Sense, fearing potential repercussions.
Let's put the startup drama aside. How helpful is RB2B?
Our team at MadKudu conducted an evaluation and testing of RB2B. I thought I would share our internal write-up with everyone (and in case you wonder, this is not a sponsored post. The RB2B team was not involved in this evaluation).
In this review, we cover the following topics:
- What RB2B does exactly
- How it differs from Clearbit Reveal, 6Sense, and others
- The coverage and accuracy we observed at MadKudu
- An analysis of 113 G2 reviews
- A pipeline calculator to estimate RB2B's potential revenue impact
What RB2B does
RB2B identifies anonymous visitors to your website.
Implementation is straightforward:
- Add the RB2B tag to your website.
- Connect RB2B to your Slack.
- Receive Slack notifications with the following information every time RB2B identifies an anonymous visitor.
Why is this interesting? How is this different?
Website deanonymization is not new; solutions like Clearbit Reveal, 6Sense, Apollo, and LeadFeeder have been around for a while.
What sets RB2B apart is its ability to identify the INDIVIDUAL visiting your website, not just the COMPANY.
Why does it matter?
If you target mid-market and enterprise companies, this distinction is crucial. For example, this alert from Clearbit Reveal might show that Vanta is on your website. However, with 50+ potential contacts at Vanta, this information is almost useless. Our sellers don't know who to reach out to at Vanta.
In contrast, the alert from RB2B identifies the specific person at Vanta (Colin here) who viewed our signal-based selling playbook library. Our salesperson can now contact Colin directly, offering a consultation on effective signal-based plays for customers like Vanta, even mentioning specific plays in the outreach.
Here is the alert we get from RB2B.
How well does it work?
We benchmarked RB2B on our website, focusing on two key metrics:
- Coverage: The percentage of visits that are deanonymized.
- Accuracy: The percentage of correctly deanonymized visits. We verified this by contacting the identified individuals to confirm their visit to our website.
To have something to compare against, we also added the performance of Clearbit Reveal for the same period (we also use Clearbit Reveal). To measure the accuracy of Clearbit, we looked at our form fills and how often the email shared in those matches the identification given by Clearbit.
Here is a table showing the results of this test:
It shows that, for us:
- RB2B has a lower match rate than Clearbit Reveal today: ~3x lower
- But the accuracy is higher: ~42% better
We were also curious about the overlap between the 2 tools. If the overlap is low, it makes sense to keep both Clearbit and RB2B (each of them helps deanonymize different parts of the web traffic).
=> We found only a 4% overlap between the companies identified by RB2B Clearbit Reveal. This means RB2B and Clearbit Reveal are pretty complementary.
What other marketers have found
The data points above are interesting. But how much can you generalize from that?
We’ve analyzed 113 reviews on G2 to see what others found. We scraped those, gave them to ChatGPT, and asked for a summary. Here is what ChatGPT said.
What people love most about RB2B:
- Contact-level Information: Users love the contact-level identification (vs. company-level)
- Ease of Setup: nearly 40% of reviews praise the simple and quick setup process, particularly the integration with Slack.
- Free Plan: The free plan is highly appreciated. Many users find it an excellent introduction to what RB2B can do.
Here are the most frequent limitations mentioned:
- Limited Coverage: Users often report that they get only a fraction of their website visitors identified, usually between 10 and 30% (similar to our benchmarks). Also, RB2B currently only tracks visitors from the US, which limits its usefulness if you have significant traffic (and revenue!) from other countries.
- Limited integrations: RB2B has added many integrations recently, but the integration with Salesforce, Marketo, Salesloft, and Zapier still shows as "coming soon".
- Pricing jump from the Free to Paid: A few reviews share their concerns about the substantial pricing jump between the free plan with capped profiles. Still, even the paid plan of RB2B remains a cheaper option than the competition.
Should you look into RB2B?
The decision should be made based on the expected pipeline versus effort.
So we’ve built here a little calculator to help determine this. Feel free to copy the calculator and see what this number looks like for you.
Recommendation
Your first-party data is the best kind of intent.
RB2B is definitively an awesome tool, especially if you have a good amount of web traffic and your ICP is in the US.
It’s pretty easy to evaluate what it can do for you: use their free plan to get a sense of the match rate you will get. And if you use MadKudu today, it’s super easy for your sellers to use this signal in combination with other signals. We’ll share more on how to do this in a separate post.
Let me know if you have more questions; I’ll be happy to share more about what we have seen work for us (and what did not!). Don’t hesitate to share your experience too.