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 going to 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 (unlike the vegans and vegetarians!).
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 mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in order to offer financial services is challenging, to say the least. While almost all SMBs will need access to various financial tools at certain points in their lifecycle, identifying when those points are 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.
Due to the slow and tedious nature of such legacy methods, by the time the crucial data reaches sales teams, it is often sorely out of date and largely irrelevant. It isn’t enough to compile up-to-date information once – you need to constantly track these data points as they change over time and know exactly when they change. This is why sales teams targeting SMBs need more than data – they need Smart Data and Continuous Intelligence!
Continuous Intelligence Pinpoints Whom to Prospect, When, and Why
The use of Continuous Intelligence enables finding the exact companies that fit your specific criteria from among the millions of potential customers, identifying a trigger that indicates they need your offering, or service, and identifying and obtaining access to the decision-makers to whom you wish to convey the advantages of your product or service.
Tarci 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
The process begins by choosing from a number of tags in order to narrow in on your target market. You can choose from industry, company size, location, number of branches, and many more.
Then, you’ll define your triggers. Define these to fit the timeline of when a client is ripe for your product offering. For example, you can set triggers that indicate overall growth or market expansion.
Tarci scans terabytes upon terabytes of external data on a weekly basis and utilizes advanced algorithms to filter the data and match with the tags and triggers you’ve chosen and supplies your sales team with fresh company profiles on a weekly basis.
Now you have the ideal target list of SMBs as identified by actionable events indicating changes in a company’s lifecycle. These weekly real-time event-based notifications about businesses are triggered to match their preset tags (search criteria or ICP), such as:
- 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 Tarci, 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
Tarci 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 Tarci’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 dynamic data is essential to give sales, marketing, and customer success teams the insights they need to focus on the right opportunities at the right time. Simply put – by harnessing the power of our continuous intelligence engine, you get actionable data that lets you grow revenue.
