With key concepts and phrases like big data, metrics, marketing analytics and benchmarks floating around our every day vocabulary we thought it appropriate to see how these might apply to the B2B marketplace.
Both sales and marketing are trying to find opportunities – whether they are called target markets, leads, prospects or some other label, all are focused on the concept of targeting your resources most effectively towards those that are most likely to turn into clients. Pretty basic.
All sorts of data is available to build models and metrics attached to records in your database as part of this effort. But – which metrics or benchmarks are important to your business? And what are you doing about getting those? The short answer is that no 1 size fits all. The company that sells real estate probably needs a lot of different data related to type of company (manufacturing or office space) and number of locations. They may not care that much about the budget a prospect has for training and education.
There are some basics that we think important and include in the records of The Global 5000. They include:
- Size – obviously the biggest companies spend the most. Most B2B companies target these with some sort of major account program
- Growth – look at year over year growth. Is the company growing? Whether it is organic growth or growth via acquisition, a company that is growing is going to have all sorts of needs and opportunities will be available.
- Revenue per employee – most companies look at this metric and measure themselves against a peer group. Are they ahead of their peers or behind? Is that revenue per employee growing year over year? If your product/service can help companies increase that revenue per employee, you have a winner. From technology to outsourcing, companies continually look for ways to increase productivity and help increase margins
- Spending categories – we keep track of three areas of spending: marketing IT and training. Yours might be different. We look at any spending categories as an indicator that the prospect does spend money and therefore, they should probably rank higher than those that do not.
- Social – some sort of indicator that the company or its employees are engaged in social media means they are outward looking. As part of that mindset, there will be more potential for them to pick up on your social media output from web sites and postings.
These are just a few examples of types of data/metrics/benchmarks that can be used to assign values to your prospects.
It takes work to develop the meaningful stats that work for you. It is not about just acquiring that data, but also working it into your existing marketing/prospect database.
For more information about The Global 5000 database of the largest companies in the world– click here — all the records contain these data elements.