3 minute read
“Our best prospects are right under our noses, but they’re scattered across the country, and we don’t know who they are until we trip over them! We need an engine that will identify our cherry prospects and serve them up in bulk.”
Our corporate services client was priming to take over a big chunk of the market dominated by a handful of conglomerates.
The sales executives knew the profile of their best targets: related companies — sharing some common ownership or management — operating in multiple states. They also knew the big guys weren’t pursuing these under-the-radar targets.
We needed to create a prospecting engine that would, on the back end, collect, warehouse and transform disparate data sets about the nation’s businesses into a common format; in the middle layer, let us suss out the company groups; and on the front end, allow the sales team to focus its efforts on selected targets within this pool.
Finding the prospect data was easy. It was readily available on multiple, public databases and from numerous private sources. But most associated companies do not reveal their interconnections in any obvious way. They often operate in multiple industries under different names, and their relationships with each other can be tenuous.
The desired tool would enable sales executives to uncover these relationships and zero in on the matches. Getting from Point A (knowing where to look) to Point B (using the data to drive sales) would require a true business intelligence solution: straightforward in concept, complex in execution.
Putting the Puzzle Together Piece by Piece
We collected data from hundreds of databases, which meant hundreds of different formats. Some of the data was real-time, some of it was dated. Some arrived in spreadsheets and some was plain, unstructured text. Most of it was unruly.
Many databases intentionally omitted critical fields, while most contained incorrect data. We filled in the gaps by merging and comparing multiple databases, much like completing a 1,000-piece puzzle from multiple sets, each with missing pieces.
With the data warehouse in place, we created a data transformation engine to convert everything into a single format, and optimized it to run repeatedly with ever-new data. Then we analyzed and massaged, analyzed and massaged, until the data began revealing its secrets.
The sales team now had a powerful, secret weapon.
Company groups could be found with a simple query — even localized to a city, a neighborhood or an office tower, for efficient sales trips — and pitched with the discounts and benefits their collective size merited.
These business owners had never before been offered such deals, indeed were unaware of what they had been missing, and happily accepted the lower prices and added services.
Our client’s sales skyrocketed! Even better, their sales effort dropped!
These deals were larger, more profitable, and closed much more quickly than normal. Top sales performers nearly tripled their productivity. And the company’s position in the market surged.
As a bonus, the tool also uncovered numerous companies that had claimed our client as their provider for years without actually registering or paying for the privilege. Our client recovered millions of dollars from these accounts for services in arrears, a completely unanticipated boon from this business intelligence exercise.
The ROI of BI
Our client measured ROI until it became boring. Once it surpassed 5,000%, they were pretty satisfied they’d made a wise investment.
The prospecting engine, with its innovative discovery capabilities, churned out top prospects in quantities that otherwise would never have been uncovered, accelerating our client’s growth and profitability.
And what about that chunk of the market they were trying to grab? Not only did they surpass every small competitor, they quickly soared to #3 in the nation.
Intelligence gained:
- Don’t let your business intelligence initiative sit on the back burner. Who knows, maybe you have a few million dollars waiting to be uncovered!
- Take advantage of competitor complacency. Think differently. Experiment.
- Invest in a custom-made secret sauce that competitors can’t easily copy or purchase.
