Last month we were discussing the basics of business data and in particular, the sources, characteristics and applications for the various types available on the market.
Remember, in moving towards best practice in B2B relationship marketing, we need to develop a deep insight into existing customers and third party data is key to this.
Admittedly data could be considered boring but it is actually very important in the discovery and insight process, and getting it wrong through misunderstanding some of the nuances could prove very costly indeed.
The main points to remember are:
- There is no single database that provides details of all UK businesses.
- Instead, there are three sources of data that provide largely complementary data attributes.
- It is unusual that one data source will be able to satisfy all requirements and therefore some aggregation is usually required.
- The attributes common to them are limited to SIC (standard industrial classification) and number of employees.
Appending SIC and employee attributes to matching customer records is usually the start of the insight process. But in my opinion it doesn’t take us very far in developing real understanding of the decision-making and purchasing process. At best, they are proxies for reflecting a propensity that a company might buy something at some time and considering that SICs were never intended to be used in marketing, blunt ones at that.
Somehow the supply side of the industry has channelled everyone’s thinking to establish this as ‘the way to do B2B profiling’ and for years has been churning our profiling reports showing indexes, penetration and Z scores for each SIC and employee size band. This might be interesting, but is hardly robust enough to base some sizeable investment decisions on.
I often challenge clients to articulate what they want to achieve from ‘profiling’ and after some discussion about more sales, or buying lists we get to the point that what they really want from analysis is to find companies who are more likely to buy their products and services and to get an understanding of ‘why’ and ‘how’.
At best, most profiling offerings describe our customers by SIC and size a static two-dimensional snapshot of an entity at a fixed point in time. This doesn’t really take us very far forward to answer the ‘why’ or the ‘how’ questions and neither considers that companies are working in a continuum.
With this I mean, that some of them are likely to have looked very different 12 months before, and are likely to evolve again in the next 12 months. All this needs to be reflected in designing an insight exercise, and importantly, in interpreting the results.
My personal view is that the suppliers have been lazy in attempting to improve this status quo (are they really still playing?) as there is a lot at stake. Taking a step back, discussing the situation with clients and considering the situation objectively, I considered that the biggest area of need is the small business sector as:
- No business database contains all small businesses. Our calculation is that around 1.5 million are missing from the usual sources of business data.
- Information is very limited about them few insights are available.
- The structure of most business databases makes it problematic to identify the owner managed small businesses.
- Together, small businesses represent an enormous aggregate opportunity for suppliers.
- Individually they are difficult to target to an effective ROI and you can’t send sales people to see them all.
We sought to create something to overcome these issues and our DNA product is the result.
The view we took was to consider that owner directors are individuals, with all the personal baggage, values, behaviours that we all carry around. These characteristics will all be brought into work with them everyday and set the tone, the personality, the values for the companies that they run and own and be brought directly to bear on the purchasing decisions that they make every day.
Combining a number of business and consumer datasets to establish links between them for the owner directors, now means that we know much, much more about these individuals, from the businesses they own, household type and income, to newspapers they read, cars they drive and more.
The point is that all this information gives us the insights we need to start to analyse the relationships between personal values and behaviour to business values and behaviours.
Primary research to 170,000 small business owners has enabled distinct typographies to be developed and extrapolated to the entire DNA database. These typographies are used to segment client databases to inform marketing communications, tone and proposition and to select prospects from the database.
The industry has a long way to go to catch up with its consumer counterparts, but at last, some positive steps are being made to bring real insight into the business-to-business sector.
