Company: Avention Inc., Concord, MA
Entry Submitted By: PAN Communications
Company Description: Avention, Inc. provides real-time, actionable B2B data from the world’s most comprehensive database to deliver 21st century business information solutions. Avention? empowers sales, marketing and research professionals with the best global B2B data available and leverages that data with its cutting-edge software.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Lead Generation Solution

Nomination Title: Avention

1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

There is no other solution like Avention. The breadth and depth of insights the product offers exceeds anything else available on the market today. Avention is a one-of-a-kind SaaS solution that helps users to analyze and understand companies and contacts at a level that was previously impossible.

With Avention, executives and salespeople can dig deeper for richer insights on more companies and more contacts in order to make better business decisions. The software leverages data from dozens of partners to provide high quality, up-to-date information, in addition to their own original research and content. Partners include, Lexis Nexis, Experian, Google, Carroll Publishing, PR Newswire and CreditSafe.

The SaaS solution offers the following features to help users excel in today’s rapidly changing business landscape:

• Avention Conceptual Search which introduces a powerful technology that captures, understands and connects companies and executive contacts to relevant topics with the ability to further associate them to traditional firmographic information. You can search by concepts such as "green energy," "corporate daycare," "data security" or any topic that is important to you so you can uncover companies that are involved in the conversation around these issues.

• Avention Business Signals which provides insight into specific characteristics of a business. Using any number of Avention’s 1,000+ Business Signals, sales people can configure and prioritize real-time listening for companies and contacts at a level of detail and timeliness never before available. Avention will listen, interpret, weigh and score real-time business signals for smarter prospecting.

• Avention Ideal Profile functionality leverages a combination of Conceptual Search and Business Signals to define the ideal customer, score the customer relative to your criteria and compare it against Avention’s global database to uncover companies that match the criteria.

• Avention SmartLists are generated by the Conceptual Search and Business Signals technologies. Because data is perishable, the lists are kept evergreen with 24x7 updating as Big Data changes. One day, SmartLists might find 362 Companies in your territory that are growing and involved in the global conversation around identity theft, the next day that number could fluctuate and those changes will be reflected accordingly Avention’s ability to accesses the data, correlate it, interpret it, and even weigh and score it in seconds is unprecedented. If the effort were attempted to be duplicated through man-power it would take days, weeks or months to come back with the same data, and it would be out-of-date. There is simply no other way to access the up-to-date and relevant information Avention provides.

Through these unique resources, better business decisions can be made and streamlined. Because the information in Avention’s system is always up to date, executives know that their efforts are focused on the most recent business changes in the marketplace. Further, this information is easily accessed and digested, so that fewer resources need to be allocated in order to fully understand the landscape of the business market. Today’s business is extremely fast paced and because of the “always-on” mentality, executives are expected to be aware of industry changes as they happen or risk becoming obsolete.

Avention acts as the eyes and ears for a company, and takes on the responsibility of being “always-on,” so employees

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Jonathan A. Flatow, CEO, brings more than 23 years of executive management experience to Avention. Prior to his current role, Jonathan held several executive positions at Greenfield Online, including Secretary, General Counsel and VP of Corporate Development and COO. Jonathan was an integral part of the team driving Greenfield’s 2004 IPO, and its subsequent sale to Microsoft. In 2009, Microsoft sold the online data collection unit of Greenfield to ToLuna PLC. Jonathan served as Special Advisor to ToLuna’s CEO and as a senior member of ToLuna’s integration committee. Prior to joining Greenfield Online, Jonathan was a partner in the law firm of Wake, See, Dimes & Bryniczka. Jonathan holds a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College and a J.D. from Pace University School of Law.