Timely and accurate data about small business health has been hard to come by. It’s a challenge we’ve been helping risk and underwriting leaders solve when it comes to determining creditworthiness.
From conversations with marketing and sales leaders, it’s clear that getting timely small and medium business (SMB) health data is also a major challenge for organizations that find and serve small business customers.
To address that need, we’re rolling out two new ways for marketing and sales leaders to access and use our SMB data.
- Discover: Build customized lists of your ideal customers.
- Enrich: Identify and prioritize the top prospects in your database.
The problem: challenges for marketing and sales teams today
Often, internal data about your customers isn’t broad or complete enough to give you actionable insights. That’s what we heard from one digital marketing leader at a super-community bank, who was looking to find growth opportunities among a flood of new customers from the Paycheck Protection Program.
We noticed other marketing and sales teams were facing this and similar challenges:
- Data sources abound, but it’s hard to find data that can accurately predict top prospects
- There hasn’t been a great way to filter businesses by accurate revenue and industry, especially for the smallest businesses
- Many marketing leaders want to identify growing SMBs of a given size, especially those with less than $10M in revenue
- Existing options for industry attributes weren’t granular enough to allow leaders to target the exact segments of greatest interest
- It’s difficult to confirm real, operating SMBs on lead lists
- Leaders say they’re often discovering many SMBs on lead lists are out of business
- Point-in-time lists don’t reflect major events in a business's lifecycle
- Getting in touch with prospects close to a major business event can generate much higher return on investment for marketing campaigns—but that’s hard to monitor manually
In other words: like risk and underwriting teams, marketing and sales teams can’t make effective decisions on stale data, either.
The need was clear. We set to work on two new products – Discover and Enrich – to help marketing and sales teams better understand their customer bases and prioritize growth opportunities.
Data with high (accuracy) standards
Our dataset of SMBs debuted for risk and underwriting use cases. Risk decisions are expensive, so our bar for accuracy has to be high.
Our dataset reflects 40-50% of all cards in the United States, covering virtually any business that accepts a credit card — more than 18 million business locations. The data contains signals like card revenue and growth based on real card transactions, and whether a business has an ecommerce presence. We layer in granular industry classification drawn from online sources.
Discover and Enrich draw upon this dataset, offsetting the marketing and sales pain points we heard, so you can now:
- Discover the small businesses that matter most to your business
- Generate custom prospect lists of real, operating business locations based on the attributes you care about most, including revenue, growth, industry, and key events in a business’s lifecycle
- Identify new and fast-growing businesses before the competition
- If they accept cards, even the smallest businesses are captured in our data
- Confidently predict which businesses will be top prospects
- Enrich your prospect or customer lists with near real-time data about industry, revenues, growth, or average transaction size to better prioritize opportunities
- Don’t waste money, time and effort on marketing to inactive businesses
- Identify promising opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell with current customers
Here are a few examples of ways you might put the data to work:
- Show me a list of all growing retail locations in the Northeast with >$100,000 in annual card revenue.
- Identify all of my current customers that are in the restaurant industry and have suddenly started to grow in the last 3 months.
- Pull a list of the fastest growing e-commerce businesses with >$1 million in annual card revenue.
Getting continually refreshed data with highly accurate industries and revenues, plus compelling events in a business’s lifecycle, can boost ROI on your marketing and sales campaigns, unlock growth opportunities, and save you from wasting marketing budget.
What’s next?
We’ll continue to build out our tools for marketing and sales teams. Here’s a look at a few items on the roadmap and what they’ll unlock for you:
- Build lists of umbrella businesses, in addition to business locations
- Filter on additional attributes, like headcount and headcount growth, and
- Access a self-serve user interface, where you can generate your own lead lists based on custom specs.
Learn more about Discover and Enrich.
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