Most companies with IT account teams and account selling strategies have a database in a CRM system and the company records in that database generally have a wide range of data elements and varying degrees of completeness. Beyond the basic demographic information, some records are more complete than others with regard to providing information that can tell the account team more about the drivers of sales potential. In some cases, this additional data may have been collected by internal staff, in other cases, it may be the result of purchased data from organizations like Harte-Hanks, RainKing, HG Data or any number of custom resources/projects.

There are some other data elements that can be added to your database from freely available resources. These data elements can enhance the company records by showing which companies will provide better opportunities. One simple example we use in The Global 5000 database is the number of employees that have a LinkedIn profile. This may be an indicator that companies with a high percentage of social media users are more likely to purchase or use certain online services. That data is free to use. Obviously, that indicator does not work for every organization and each company needs to test the data correlation between customers and the attributes, environment or product usage.

Other free and interesting data can be found in government filings. For example, any firm with benefit and 401k plans must file federal funds and that filing data is available from the US government. A quick scan of the web site data.gov  shows a number of options and data sets available for download and integration into your prospect database. The National Weather Center, for example, provides a number of specific long term contracts which can be helpful for anyone selling to the agriculture market.

There are a number things that need to be considered when importing and appending or modeling external data. Some of the key aspects include:

  • A match code or record identifier whereby external records can be matched to your internal company records. Many systems use the DUNS number from D&B rather than trying to match on company names which can have too many variations to be useful.
  • The CRM record level needs to be established so that the organization is focused on companies at a local entity level or at the corporate HQ level.  For example, if your are selling multi-national network services, having lots of site recrods is probably not helpful when you most likely have to sell at the corporate level.
  • De-dupe your existing customers. When acquiring and integrating an external file — those external sources won’t know your customer set and you will likely be importing data about your existing customers. If you are going to turn around and send this new, enhanced data to your team, it makes sense to identify or remove existing clients from that effort so that your organization is not marketing to them all over again.
  • Identifying the key drivers that turn the vast sea of companies into prospects and then into clients will provide a solid list of key data attributes that can be used to append to existing records.  For example, these drivers may include elements such as revenue growth, productivity measures such as revenue per employee, credit ratings, multiple locations or selected industries.

In this era of marketing sophistication with increasing ‘tons’ of Big Data being available and sophisticated analytical tools coming to market every company has the opportunity to enhance their internal data by integrating external data and going to market armed with more insight than ever before.

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