1. Identify growth opportunities with specific organizational characteristics
By adding external business characteristics to your analyses, you gain a more in-depth and detailed understanding of both the market and your ideal customer profile. This will help the marketing and sales department identify and target new, promising target groups. For example, consider these business characteristics:
- Business activities
- Location
- Company size
- Group structure
- Premises information
- Financial performance
A good example of this comes from Eneco. They know exactly which companies potentially want to buy solar panels. For their market and customer research, they use the characteristics of location, roof area, type of roof and year of construction. Companies with, for example, a too small or unsuitable roof are excluded from their marketing and sales activities, allowing them to target the right audience precisely. This way, the target group is smaller and the chances of new deals are higher.
2. Identify fraud indicators with business data
Financial service providers, such as insurers, have a legal obligation to prevent fraud. One way to detect fraudulent acts is to work with fraud indicators. You gain insight into these fraud indicators through external data:
- The company address on the website is different from the address given at the Chamber of Commerce
- The company has a strange combination of industry codes (SBI codes)
- The company has no website
- There is only a financial holding company, without an operating company attached to it
- The destination of the building does not match the business activities
- The company imports or exports from countries with a heightened risk of doing business with.
Figures from the Association of Insurers show that an active approach to insurance fraud saves as much as 82 million euros per year. So it is definitely worth using external B2B data for this purpose.
3. Making strategic choices with real-time data
For available, up-to-date and real-time data, the Internet is a gold mine. With these 3 sources and techniques, you will gain valuable insights:
- Webcrawling. This technique helps you track market trends and developments.
- Information from news articles. This allows you to respond to market changes or customer account changes.
- Reviews. These help you discover potential product improvements.
RoyalHaskoningDHV has a great example of this. Commissioned by the government, they wanted to map circular business in the Netherlands. Using web crawling, they crawled 135 keywords, from "zero waste" to "chemical recycling. This revealed more than 100,000 circular companies, resulting in in-depth insights into the development of the Dutch circular economy. The government uses those insights as the foundation for new policies.
4. Facilitating company acquisitions with market indicators
Is your organization considering a business acquisition? As a first step, you'll want to profile the ideal acquisition candidate. External B2B data is a highly suitable tool for this. You can analyze and map companies based on:
- Branche
- Financial situation
- Shrinkage and growth indicators
- Size in terms of employees and locations
- International activity level of a company
- Job vacancies
- Specific keywords on company websites
Once you have clarity on these indicators, you'll know exactly what characteristics your ideal acquisition candidate should possess. This makes the search for such a company much more targeted and therefore easier.
5. Forecasting and predicting
For future predictions, use a combination of internal data, such as the current sales value of your customers, and external data with predictive value. Good examples are financial characteristics, vacancy data and employee development. Based on the customer profile and the behavior of similar customers, you find out the future behavior of (potential) customers. With this you predict, for example:
- Who your prospective customers are
- Which customers are more likely to default
- What is the (growth) potential of your existing and new customers
- What are good cross- and upsell opportunities and which customers are open to this
Want to know more?
No matter what application you use external B2B data for: you will always discover in-depth, valuable insights. This allows you to discover growth opportunities and risks much faster, keeping you ahead of your competitors. If you are a data or BI analyst, would you like to know more about the different types of external data and their advantages and disadvantages? Then check out the Company.info website.
About Company.info
Company.info delivers unique, innovative B2B data to data analysts, data scientists, and BI analysts in compliance with laws and regulations. This ensures deeper, valuable insights, enabling B2B organizations to increase revenue, streamline operations, and reduce risks.
