There is a wealth of information available on companies and markets that B2B marketers can use to improve prospect targeting, give sales teams the edge they need to win, minimise marketing waste and even manage ongoing customer relations. Karim Iskandar, VP International at OneSource Information Services (providers of business information) offers advice on how access to those essential nuggets of information can make a real impact on marketing and sales effectiveness.
Don’t drown in data
Business information on customers, prospects and even suppliers as well as on existing and new markets can be incredibly valuable to B2B Marketing teams. But spending hours searching for more information on every single customer and prospect and then making sense of the results is probably not the fastest route to finding the key facts that you need and could cost you a lot in wasted productivity. Worse there is a high chance that you still don’t find the pieces of information that are really useful to the marketing function and that what you do find could be out of date.
Find the information that is useable
To save drowning in data and wasting time and money sourcing data, many business information services can provide instant access to detailed business and financial data and up-to-date news on millions of companies and thousands of industries around the world. The cleansing has already been done which means that you can specify exactly what data you think will be of most of use. You can either download it to a spreadsheet or integrate it instantly into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system or database to increase the value of your customer and prospect files.
Having customer data on the name of the manager responsible for a specific business function; the number of employees; and turnover, for example might be useful to refine the segmentation of your prospect list. This can save waste in marketing campaigns and ensure that sales people spend their time and energy (and your budget) phoning and visiting only those companies that are most likely to fit your ideal customer’ profile. It also gives you a fast-track into the company, getting to the right person faster and showing that you’ve taken the time to research and understand the company and market. Intercall Europe, a provider of conferencing services to businesses, estimated that it has saved £489,000 on time spent generating leads since it started using the OneSource Business Browser service.
In addition, details on financial performance can ensure that you don’t target those companies who may end up being high risk’.
Keeping up to date
Once you’ve got the information on your customer and prospect list, keeping up to date with new developments can be very useful. News about a company can provide an ideal reason to make a call or suggest your company’s services. It might even be one of the ways you segment your prospect list – for example all companies that have just been involved in a merger or acquisition or all companies who have just moved offices. Ideally the information should be able to be delivered to the sales people or account handlers who are responsible for specific companies. One way of doing this is to attach news alerts’ to the information that’s already in the CRM system. Another way is to deliver daily alerts on the companies that each person is tracking/wants to monitor.
Accessible
Who needs to use the information and how easy is it for them to access? Having the right information is important, but it needs to be accessible too. The sales team can benefit enormously from being given just enough information on a prospect at the right time in the sales cycle. Many sales calls are made to prospects who are unlikely or expensive, as a cost of sale, to convert to new business, or unlikely to be a profitable prospect. With the right information on company financials or size of the industry, for example, it is possible to segment the market and focus efforts on those companies that are best suited to the solution.
Knowledge on the company, the market it operates in, its competitors and its business pains will also help the sales team build a proposition that addresses the prospects area of need. All decision-makers, including those at board level, will appreciate, and expect, its suppliers to know their business.
Actionable
While speed and availability of the right information is of course important it also needs to be actionable. By that I mean that the information needs to be used as part of a well-defined marketing process. I have often been surprised at how little information is used (not necessarily unavailable) by marketers. Simply having access to information is not enough. It needs to be integrated into the business workflow. So enabling prospecting, telesales, sales and account managers with the right information at the right time will improve the chances of the information being useful and making a real difference to marketing effectiveness. Understanding of how to combine and interpret disparate kinds of information from different sources will be necessary. If marketers don’t have this expertise in house, it is advisable to seek the help of information consultants who can analyse the data that already exists internally with what is needed from external sources to drive strategy or provide a tactical plan for what information is needed during specific operational processes. In this way waste is minimised and the benefits of actionable information can be immediately realised.
The companies that can continue to survive and even grow will be using not just sourcing information on their customers, suppliers and markets, to help them reduce the cost of marketing, minimise business risk and increase sales.
