How ‘Money on the Move’ led to Lantern

How ‘Money on the Move’ led to Lantern

Introduction

My journey to founding Lantern began during my time as a Data Scientist at a fast-growing cybersecurity startup. As we rapidly expanded our customer base, we added more tools to increase sales efficiency. However, the more tools we added, the harder it became to manage our prospects and customers effectively. We soon realized we had a fundamental problem—our customer data was siloed and scattered across inadequate tooling.

The Shift in SaaS Wisdom

The last wave of software companies emerged when fully integrated local solutions began to break apart into numerous narrow cloud-based SaaS tools. While point solutions initially helped organizations gradually move workloads to the cloud, this unbundling strategy started to show flaws over time, particularly in the revenue tooling space. Today, the average revenue team stitches together over 30 different customer-specific tools, leading to high costs, complex integrations, and fragmented customer experiences.

The Need for Efficiency in a Market Downturn

As we enter the AI age and face an economic downturn, operations teams are reevaluating their go-to-market (GTM) stack. Consolidation is already revolutionizing HR (Rippling) and cybersecurity (Wiz), and revenue tools are next. Teams are looking to consolidate tools and leverage AI technology to create personalized experiences for their prospects and customers. However, an intelligent AI-powered system still requires a single source of truth to unveil insights and drive next-gen workflows.

Introducing Lantern

In 2020, I founded Lantern with the belief that every company should operate with a single system for customer information that powers engagement and automation across the entire enterprise. Lantern offers a next-generation system of record for customer data, integrating with over 30 sources and unifying all data in the customer journey, including prospect, intent, and customer data.

Champion Chaser: Inspired by "Money on the Move"

During my time at the cybersecurity company, we developed a suite of predictive models internally called "Money on the Move." This program tracked our champions and enabled us to sell to them again, even as they moved to new roles and companies. Inspired by the success of "Money on the Move," we built Lantern's Champion Chaser product.

Champion Chaser tracks job changes within your customer base and target accounts twice as fast as the competition. It captures data from over 30 sources, includes AI intent scores, and seamlessly integrates those changes directly into your tech stack and workflows. By identifying and targeting champions as they move, Champion Chaser helps you expand your reach and drive more revenue.

Our Champion Chaser customers, such as Flatfile, are seeing the value of this approach and are signing on to the Customer Cloud product as they add more complex workflows and data sources into Lantern.

Conclusion

As we enter the era of 're-bundling' driven by AI, Lantern is leading the way towards a revenue tech stack revolution. The next generation of CRMs won't look like today's aging CRM. Revenue-producing teams will surface and act on real-time insights more efficiently and effectively. The future will be a dynamic system of record for all customer and prospect data, powered by a suite of interconnected products and unified workflows.

‍