When Internal Content Meets External Business Information

Any decision is only as good as the information behind it. Companies know that accurate information is their most important asset—capable of shedding vital insight on current customers, prospects, competitors, partners and suppliers. However, such information is also volatile, highly perishable, often scarce and costly: professionals who develop client relationships spend 16% of their workweek obtaining, reviewing and evaluating information. One study of the U.S. business community estimates the total annual cost at $107 billion (Outsell, Inc., 2002).

Aside from the enormous cost of ad hoc research conducted by “information amateurs,” having the best-possible business intelligence available is crucial to a company’s competitive advantage. Educating sales teams on new industries, keeping relationship managers up-to-date on significant customer events, analyzing the financial health of prospects and suppliers, mapping corporate parents and subsidiaries, following changes in executive staffs—all these combine to keep every customer-facing part of the organization on top of its game.

Why, then, do corporations determined to arm their professionals with outstanding business intelligence often fail in this mission? As documented time and again, the vast majority of internal client information applications, such as customer portals and CRM installations, fail to achieve their full potential. Why?

Their failure is not due to a lack of database skills or people or dollars. Instead, failure is usually due to:

• insufficient in-house content expertise;
• inadequate business information taxonomy; and;
• poor—or no—tools.

The Expertise Factor

Content optimization and taxonomy development are specialized fields. Most internal corporate staff are not experienced enough to create a robust information solution without expert help.

The Taxonomy Factor

The classification regime applied to your information can make all the difference.Most taxonomy solutions being offered on the market have been focused only on unstructured (text) documents, like news files. They run deep on business and topic terms but don’t perform well for tagging companies with a unique identifier—the key entity in a customer-focused application. They lack global breadth below the top few thousand companies and they almost all lack the hierarchical corporate family information necessary to identify and tag references to subsidiary operations of diverse multi-national corporations.

The Tools Factor

Tools and services to apply taxonomies have likewise focused on auto-classification of textual information, using advanced techniques that analyze the distribution or presence of key words and phrases. While textual classification approaches have become quite sophisticated, they have a significant weakness: they fall down when it comes to handling structured (database-driven) information.Much critical business information (such as corporate profiles, key contacts, opportunity assessments, purchase history and much more) resides in databases. In fact, the majority of client data needed to populate a CRM or customer portal is exactly this kind of structured database-driven information.Integrating structured company data requires maintaining a controlled universe of key corporate data and deploying sophisticated matching algorithms. Such algorithms utilize data points like address, phone, and postal code and don’t just rely on company name. And because no company limits its sales to publicly traded companies, common taxonomies like stock ticker don’t cover the necessary universe of companies.

The Complete Solution

A complete content integration solution must handle structured and unstructured data, making it accessible from a single point in a customer portal or CRM system.A comprehensive solution should include:

• A broad, integrated taxonomy that covers companies, topics, industries/lines of business, and geographies equally well. The taxonomy should encompass both metadata for textual documents (e.g., call reports, news stories) and structured company data (e.g., corporate profiles and sales histories). Applying an extensive taxonomy to internal data creates an organized, interrelated dataset that can be explored and filtered quickly and accurately. And if that taxonomy is supported and maintained by a commercial business information service, a seamless link to external content can be established more easily.

• Support for company aliases, former names, common identifiers (like ticker and CUSIP), and subsidiary names. The taxonomy should support mapping to a variety of commercial company identifier;

• Complete integration with industry standards like SIC and ISO codes as well as other proprietary schemes. Any commercial taxonomy that ignores standard codes is not robust enough.

• Auto-classification tools to apply a taxonomy to unstructured text documents with a high degree of accuracy;

• Automated matching tools to map structured company files to a common company taxonomy;

• Editorial review as well as automated matching and classification techniques, because no automated tool can perform matching to the high degree of certainty and completeness required for CRM or customer portals;

• An ongoing maintenance program to keep up with name changes, effects of mergers and acquisitions, etc ;

When internal content is wisely integrated with external business information, the result is a new level of business intelligence that affects the entire customer life cycle. Sales preparation is better, close ratios are higher, risk is mitigated, due diligence is robust, insight is deeper, responses are faster, and confidence is greater throughout.

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OneSource provides Web-based business information to professionals who need quick access to reliable corporate, industry and market intelligence. Contact OneSource at 978.318.4300 or visit www.onesource.co