Imagine this: you’re a butcher shop and in an effort to increase sales, you send fliers to every home in the neighborhood. Seems like a smart idea, right? Send out a local promotion and increase sales, easy as that. Well, what if 20% of the neighborhood is vegetarian and 10% are vegan? Then at least 30% of your expected sales are never going to realize.
But there’s more. What if another 20% already ordered enough meat to last a whole winter? They’re not gonna be in the market for more meat for quite some time… So now a full 50% of your sales efforts are nearly guaranteed to be fruitless.
Okay, so you’re not running a butcher shop, but you are running a sales department and you’re targeting SMBs – the same logic still applies. You need to know more details about your audience in order to ensure that you aren’t wasting valuable time trying to sell your product to people who are completely irrelevant: like trying to sell meat to vegetarians or people with fully stocked freezers.
Targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in order to offer financial services is challenging, to say the least. While SMBs will surely need access to financial tools at certain points in their lifecycle, identifying when the time is “ripe” for them has never been easy.
Changes happen at a brisk pace for SMBs, making them an elusive target. This leaves sales teams in the financial sector struggling with three key challenges when targeting SMBs:
- Sales personnel must be able to assess in real time which potential clients are most likely to engage – for this they need fresh and accurate data.
- Collecting these important data points is incredibly difficult, as they are dispersed across many different sources – a company website, government agencies, regulator publications, etc.
- It isn’t enough to have this data, sales teams also need to know when a change has happened for the prospective client – to foresee when they are most in need of the financial products on offer.
These difficulties are compounded when considering the scarcest and most critical of all resources – time; It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to compile a list of relevant businesses to target using traditional methods of data gathering, and it’s almost impossible to know if you are targeting the right business at the right time.
Continuous Intelligence Pinpoints Whom to Prospect, When, and Why
Leadgence takes the pulse of SMBs worldwide, providing smart, dynamic, and actionable smart SMB data to a wide range of financial services, fintech, and insurance companies, which is used to empower every customer interaction:
- Cross-sell and increase Lifetime Value (LTV) through event-triggered activity
- Win new accounts and upsell your existing client base
- Improve customer renewal and maximize retention
- Provide competitive quotes
- Early signs of international expansion
- Growth in hiring
- New location coming soon
- Service provider contract up for renewal
- Business applying for a license or permit
Continuous Intelligence Allows You to Be Proactive with Existing Customers
Customer Success teams are always on the lookout for customers at risk of churn or upsell opportunities; however, relying on cold customer data provides an incomplete and somewhat short-sighted vision of a company’s future. With Leadgence, growth teams enrich existing databases with external data and get regular alerts about need-to-know change events, including:
- Change in decision maker/key management
- Adding currency/international shipping option
- Change in industry rating or review scoring
- Application to a governmental or regulatory body
Leadgence clients supercharged their sales, marketing, and retention across all funnel metrics. When a financial services company reached out via email to a list of SMBs created using Leadgence’s triggers and tags, they saw incredible results:
- 51% open rate
- 12% CTR
- 4.6% positive response rate
When contacting businesses from the Smart Data group by phone, the same company saw a 9% positive response conversion, as compared with a 1.5% cold data benchmark.
SMBs make up about 90% of businesses and employ more than 50% of the workforce; that’s a vast and diverse marketplace with tons of data scattered across innumerable sources, making it ever more difficult to identify, extrapolate, and analyze which of the data is truly valuable.
That is why turning big data into Smart Data is essential to providing sales, marketing, and customer success teams the insights they need to grow revenues by focusing on the right opportunities at the right time. Simply put – to turn big data into actionable data you need to turn it into Continuous Intelligence.
