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    In today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, companies are searching for ways to quickly grow their businesses. Many organizations adopt a data-driven approach that attempts to extract maximum value from their data resources. A problem they often face is obtaining viable external data that can be used productively to further business objectives.

    An illustrative example of Explorium’s power

    Rather than simply explaining how Explorium can help your business, let’s look at a fictional software development company called SM Software. We’ll show how Explorium’s superior data puts them in an excellent position to identify potential clients and grow their business.

    SM Software has developed a product called “Just Flush It!” for plumbers. The product identifies properties that are more likely to have piranha plants in their pipes that need to be removed. The company’s owners, Mario and Luigi, are looking for plumbers interested in purchasing their product. 


    The first problem the new company needs to tackle is finding plumbers that might be interested in this product, so Luigi decides to get started and searched the Internet for the term “plumbers in California”. He gets a lot of results, the majority of which are directly promoted by the search engine. He’s a bit overwhelmed with the search results and immediately has some questions that he can’t easily answer. 

    • How can he identify the plumbers that would be interested in his product?
    • Which accounts are most promising and should be focused on first?

    Luigi feels that he is procrastinating and wasting time, so he chooses an ad from a company promising hot leads. Navigating to their website, he swipes his credit card and receives an automated email response with an attached file. Feeling satisfied with his purchase, he opens the file and is extremely disappointed in what he sees. The issues with the data provided in the file include:

    • Irrelevant businesses that have no association with plumbing;
    • Plumbers that are no longer in business;
    • Huge plumbing chains that are not in scope for SM Software’s product;
    • Many duplicate records that need to be cleaned up;
    • Records that are missing crucial information such as revenue, number of employees, and the primary account contact.

    Explorium provides a superior way

    Explorium offers a better solution. With Explorium, SM Software can obtain relevant and fresh data and manipulate it in ways that directly address their search for new customers. Let’s take a look at how to get started by generating data to facilitate SM Software’s search. 

    The first step is to generate a list of all plumbers on the West Coast. This is done by logging onto the Explorium platform and clicking the Generate button.

    Multiple options are available when generating data. We will begin with the companies starter tool and look at more refined search options later.

    Luigi can now enter his desired search parameters. 

    • He first selects Location and chooses the three West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington.
    • Next, Luigi must choose the Business category and select Plumber.
    • SM Software is focusing their efforts on small businesses and Explorium has data on over 135 million SMBs. They further refine their search by selecting companies with a revenue of up to $25 million and no more than 50 employees.
    • To ensure the list only contains plumbers, Luigi deselects the Include related categories option to prevent the inclusion of companies in the same field like those that install air conditioning.
    • Luigi clicks Next to finish the data generation process.

    Luigi and Mario are very pleased to see that there are 6,164 SMBs in scope providing them with a tremendous market for their software. The search results offer information like the location, phone number, and revenue of the potential customers. 

    Dragging a column name up displays the number of companies in each revenue bucket. The list below indicates that 2461 of the 6164 SMBs have revenue between 1M and 5M. This is their target audience! They can’t wait to see what else Explorium can tell them about how to locate the most likely potential customers.

    Summary

    Explorium offers one of the most flexible tools to solve the increasing need to generate relevant accounts for today’s growing businesses. In this post we reviewed how the platform could be used to easily generate the data and pinpoint the right customers for you. 

    In subsequent posts, we will go on a step-by-step journey that takes a detailed look at how the product works and how you can use it to find the best customers and grow your business. We will look at the following capabilities:

    • The functionality to enrich the data by drilling down into its details and obtaining additional signals that provide a better understanding of the intended market. 
    • The capability to score accounts into tiers so the focus can be directed on the most promising potential customers.
    • Automated deduplicating of collected data against existing sources so only new data is brought into the system.
    • Exporting capabilities that let SM Software put the data into forms that can be easily used by internal teams such as CSVs, a data warehouse, or a CRM solution.