Robert Holland from DataGardener, the business data specialists, talks about the vital importance of finding and utilising the right data in order to target your marketing efforts to the best effect.

We all recognise that everyone has had a pretty tough time over the last year or so, between Brexit, COVID and the related pressures on business. As a result of these pressures the economy has seen a slump the likes of which we have never seen before. The end is hopefully in sight but until it reaches a conclusion, we all need to keep going, and continue to dig deeper and work harder.

The two main things that we hear that businesses are looking for right now are:

- Finding new prospects

- Knowing who you are dealing with

Know Who You are Dealing With

Knowing who you are dealing with has become more and more important. The global economy means that you can access new partners, find new customers – and this is exciting. But it can be quite scary at the same time. Dealing with people who you have never met before naturally throws up a host of questions:

• Who exactly are these people?
• What is their background?
• Can I trust them?
• Will they pay me?
• Will they supply when they promise?
  
  

Finding New Prospects

You might have robust sales systems but, as anyone in sales will acknowledge, you need the right leads, those with the potential to develop into sales, to drop into your funnel, but these are not always easy to come by, unless you know the right places to look. This can take hours of research. For a new business, looking to launch an exciting new service or product, researching the market to establish which businesses to target is essential, and you soon find out how difficult it can be making those connections.

Eyeballing potential clients in the ‘new normal’

Attracting and approaching new prospective clients to generate revenue is the bread and butter for thousands of businesses. It’s a simple yet elegant dance; your company provides a service, so you have to find new clients to provide that service to. However, how exactly do you decide which prospects to pursue and which not pursue? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? Time spent pursuing clients that ultimately aren’t a good fit for your business is a drain on resources and ends up eating into any potential profits to be found via other companies.

Merely eyeballing prospects based on general performance used to be the business mainstay. However, in the information era, this is simply no longer good enough. For example, there has been a large recent rise in fraudulent companies. These companies appear to have solid growth rates, and this attracts quite a few risky investors. Unfortunately, if you take the due diligence to just dig a little deeper to find the company address and look them up on Google Streetview, you’ll see that the official company address is often some shack in the middle of nowhere. By taking the time to find the right data and use this data to influence your decision making, you can avoid investing or working with clients whose business is not all that it seems.

Once the importance of data-driven decision making and due diligence is established, how exactly do we go about practicing it? There are a various categories of business data that can be useful when assessing client suitability, such as the prospect’s financial data, growth data, CEO data, supply chain data and interactions, such information can help you to assess the financial stability of a company and to weed out anyone unsuitable or unlikely to benefit from your service.

DataGardener are a business information and database provider based in the UK. We provide company data, business information and UK financial data. Our company database is used for credit/risk reporting, KYC and B2B marketing.

https://datagardener.com/