Recently I started a new engagement with a B2b technology client who have some interesting sales & marketing challenges that they want to resolve.
I can’t go into details on who the client is, but their problem is pretty common… So I thought I’d lay it out here.
Challenges facing client
The main problem (From the clients perspective)
At the core is finding customers who are a good fit and are likely to have a common pain point. Prospecting customers who aren’t interested is a waste of time and is quite costly.
This probably sounds familiar.
When they actually get in front of clients for sales meetings, they have a pretty good close rate. So their sales process beyond the prospecting while can always be improved isn’t the core business issue.
The main problem (From my perspective)
A lot of past customers have left. NOT due to service issues but because they went bust. While these customers have been valuable in revenue terms, the cost of winning a customer that is going to go bust is no different to that of one that won’t.
If you lose a client for every client you gain or even for every two clients you gain, it’s a slow climb to success.
Obvious solutions
- Credit check clients before you take them on or even prospecting
- Profile existing clients (companies and directors) and find more of the same
- Profile clients (companies only) that have failed and exclude them
Solution architecture
Now at a basic level you could achieve anyone of the above in isolation. There are lots of credit check companies and sales people often profile clients based on turnover and sector for prospect lists.
But ideally all of this needs to be brought together in a single solution that feeds the sales CRM good prospects. It also needs to take the ernest off the sales team and into the hands of the management of the business as to where their growth is coming from.
Where to get the data?
So these ideas are great but to execute them we need a stack of data, mainly around the business entities so that we can profile them.
Target companies
As I mentioned the company is a B2b tech company so when profiling we’re looking for trends around their existing tech use to see if there are any similarities.
- BuiltWith – From $295/m
- SimilarTech – From $200/m
Business data
To profile the companies business situation there are some good sources for turnover and other key indicators.
- DueDil – Free to £99 + VAT/month
- CompanyCheck – Free to £20/month
- Bureau van Dijk – Fame
- Experian
Other data
Based on a recent interview I did with Verne Harnish I know that early senior marketing hires are a key component of a companies success. So I’m going to look at some marketing metrics to profile for whether I think my prospects are winners or not.
Ed Roberts, the senior faculty member at MIT who did some of the original research in high performing companies found that the difference between a high performing company and one that wasn’t is was there an early key member of the team focussed on marketing versus you know the technology to build the product or whatever the case was”
- Shared Count – From $40/m
- Follower Wonk social authority – From free
- ProgrammableWeb SEO APIs (Too many to mention any one)
What next
We’re going to use the above sources to get data on the past customer base which is 100+ companies. Then we’re going to get a quant analyst (or data scientist if you’re modern) to identify correlating trends.
Then the data will be pumped into the CRM and we’ll monitor the results over the coming months and years.
Have a similar issue?
If you have a similar problem? Click here get in touch and I’ll see if a similar approach could help you.
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