Industry and revenue are both key inputs for segmenting your small business prospects and customers. However, it’s hard for lenders to find a single data source that can provide both. Enigma has increased the accuracy and granularity of our Industries attribute, so that you can use revenue, growth, and detailed industry data to build prospect lists that exactly match your ideal customer profile (ICP).
To understand why it’s critical to have both industry and revenue data, let’s consider an example. A merchant financing company, Kappa Financing, knows their ICP is merchants who match the following criteria:
Kappa currently uses a range of sales tools and data providers to get leads, but half of the leads are either in the wrong industry or don’t have the right transaction sizes.
Previously, Enigma could have helped Kappa precisely target based on revenue or transaction size, but not industry. Now we can.
With our latest improvements to industry accuracy and granularity, Enigma can help you build prospect lists or prioritize existing customers based on both detailed financial information and industry. Enigma has invested in building data models to accurately categorize industry for years, and we’re excited to share this latest improvement with our customers.
For a deeper understanding of the update, we spoke with Jinghong Cui, Product Manager for Industries.
It comes down to two things. First, we’ve simplified our industry classification to be based predominantly on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Previously, we were joining multiple different classification systems.
Second, we can now tag more granular industries with better accuracy. We’ve added more than 260 new NAICS codes—triple the number we had before—many of which are at a granular four- or six-digit level.
Enigma has industry data for over 30 million business locations. And for the millions of businesses where we provide card transaction data, our research indicates over 95% industry accuracy.
"For the millions of businesses where we provide revenues and growth data, our research indicates over 95% industry accuracy."
Accurate and granular industry data, along with revenues and growth, are crucial for segmenting and prioritizing prospects. You want to find customers that are a good fit for your product. Most marketing and sales teams have a clear idea of what kinds of businesses are a good fit — their challenge is identifying and reaching those businesses. That’s where better data can help.
In some cases, our latest update doubles the detailed industry data available to customers. At the same time, we’ve simplified the attribute structure so it’s easier to understand and use.
Since accuracy and granularity are both so important in how we label businesses by industry, a major goal of this update is to increase the number of businesses we can categorize into industry codes with four- or six-digit granularity.
The graph below shows the impact of this update on Enigma's businesses where we provide card transaction data. The increase in four-digit or more granular NAICS codes means that businesses matched by Enigma now feature much more specific detail.
There are two learnings that jumped out.
One is that sometimes the way the NAICS Association classifies a business is not the same as what lenders might expect. For example, some of our customers consider a retail bakery to be a retail store, which would fall under NAICS sector 44-45. However, “retail bakery” is actually classified under NAICS sector 31-33 (Manufacturing).
The other is that some customers want even more granular industry classification than the six-digit NAICS code. For example, “wedding planning services” is currently grouped into NAICS code 812990 - All Other Personal Services. A closely related industry, “bridal gown shops,” is grouped into a completely different category, NAICS code 448190 - Other Clothing Stores. We’re hoping to address this challenge in a future release.
Customers can build custom prospect lists with filters based on the following Enigma data:
You can also use these attributes to enrich existing customer or prospect databases and prioritize businesses for marketing or sales campaigns.
Want to learn more about how Enigma's data can help you find your ideal small business customers? Get in touch for a customized demo.
