How much are your leads worth?

It’s easy to pop the cork out of the champagne bottle and book an all-inclusive holiday to the Maldives when you have an incoming lead who wants to place a huge order for your product or service. All done and dusted, right?

Nopes. You see, though they may have potential to place a giant order you actually have no idea whether they’ll be able to pay for it, or if their company has a bad habit of making late payments. So how can you evaluate which leads should be qualified and prioritised?

Businesses can really run into trouble if they are giving away credits without doing checks – it’s really just monitoring risk of a business deal and safeguarding your company against having to chase for payments which could potentially affect cash flow. With the average small-to-medium-sized business being owed £40,857 in unpaid invoices and having £20,937 of that total is overdue (1), it’s wise to ensure you know that customers can pay on time.

According to recent research (1), 60% of UK SMEs are experiencing delayed payments with 25% of them admitting that if the amount they are owed grew by approximately £12,000 to £50,000, it would be just the ticket to bankruptcy. Furthermore, the late payments are costing 18% of businesses £500 through chasing for the payments. So it’s pretty expensive and involves unnecessary costs!

This is where data profiling comes in. It’s an important tool which provides business intelligence in seconds to determine a plethora of background information on a company to see if they are a lead worth pursuing. Important financial factors such as credit score, which includes their credit rating and limit, balance sheet details and company status are all found super quickly, allowing your employees to make a pretty rapid decision as to whether the company is worth having as a customer. Using reliable data sources such as Companies House, data is updated daily to ensure the data quality is second to none and no old information is being presented to employees or stored in CRM.

Let me put it like this, without directions on a car journey to somewhere unknown, you’re not going to get to your destination. It’s the same with a lead – the more details you have, the easier it is to determine how worthwhile they are and then you end up with making the right decision.

What other information can be retrieved?

• Company group structures to make more informed decisions about who to trade with, and discover new opportunities
• Incorporation date
• Registered address
• SIC Code and description
• Trading addresses
• Directors

Not only does this information provide an overview of the company, it is stored in CRM in all the correct fields which works beautifully for targeted marketing as records are wholesome, standardised and formatted. Without having up to date or informational records, studies have shown that an average of 12% of revenue is lost due to wasted marketing spend and communications and reputational damage was experienced by 21% of companies.

So now that you have all this background information using the profiling tool, you gain an idea of what your potential customer is really like without having long drawn out phone conversations or trawling through the internet. It’s time for prioritisation of all your leads and down to you to get them to convert into business!

References

(1) £26 BILLION OWED IN LATE PAYMENTS, BACS, 2016