How Red Flag Alert’s API Can Maximise Sales and Marketing

Data is key to sales; good data is detailed, accurate, and up to date. Sales teams armed with this kind of data can become more efficient by targeting their strategies at convertible leads, and not wasting time trying to sell to unsuitable companies.

Integrating an API into your CRM is an effective way to enrich your sales data. An API automatically updates your CRM with data about key prospects, giving your sales teams the information, they require to deliver results.

How an API helps enrich data

Our API can enrich your sales data in several ways, here are four of them:

1. Provide your sales team with in-depth data.

Connecting an API based on high-quality data to your CRM will provide your sales team with rich data on prospects.

Once your CRM is connected to the API, your sales team can use this data to find companies to target and check that these targets are suitable. This means they can focus their energy on the prospects most likely to convert. Here are some examples of how this could work:

• If a company sells software to large manufacturers, you could use financial data to check if the company will pass your credit control. By avoiding companies with poor credit, your sales team won’t waste time on prospects that can’t be onboarded.
• By using data on company size, your sales team could use this to confirm the manufacturer they are targeting is large enough to need your software.
• If you provide different solutions to companies of different sizes, you could tailor your sales material to highlight the benefits your software can bring to a company of the target’s size.
• If the data provides information about key contacts at a company, your team won’t have to waste time either searching for contact details or contacting the wrong people.

With our API, you can enjoy full visibility of every UK business. Our estimated turnover feature will help you monitor not only large organisations but also SMEs; since companies under the £10 million turnover threshold don’t have to announce their turnover it can be difficult to find your ideal client. There is a huge difference between companies turning over a few thousand and those turning over a few million making this feature very useful if you’re interested in doing business with micro-entities.

2. Ensure your data is always up to date.

If you use a static CRM, your data will only be up to date at the time you input it. Bad sales data is not updated regularly; this means it won’t contain the details needed for your sales team to build successful campaigns.

However, if your API is connected to sources that provide current information, it will update automatically, ensuring you are always using the most up-to-date information.

Here are several ways this can help:

• Having access to up-to-date financial data means your sales team will know that the companies they are prospecting are financially healthy enough to be able to afford your solution.
• Up-to-date data can help you spot and take advantage of changes in a company. For example, a company that sells software to manage marketing processes could look out for businesses that are growing and which may need help keeping their efforts organised.
• If the data provided includes recently formed companies, sales teams will be aware of these as soon as they are established. This means they will be able to target them earlier than they otherwise would have been able to.

Red Flag Alert keeps records already in your CRM up to date. This means not only the sales team, but your entire business will always be operating on real-time information with our automatic updates.

3. Help with lead generation.

An API can help solve the problem of insufficient data on leads. For example, if you use a web form to collect data, you’ll know how much of a problem web form abandonment is, incorrect data on these forms can also be an issue.

However, using an API can help solve both problems. The API can use the information input into the form – such as the name of a company – and then automatically populate the CRM with other relevant data about the organisation, such as size, financial health, and location. This means when you search your CRM for prospective companies, you will have full reports including any results/information you want, saving time.

This will give your sales team a fuller picture of leads than they would have had otherwise. As an added benefit, abandonment rates should decrease if you have a simpler web form.

A common issue when prospecting can be misleading sic codes. Sic codes are often wrong since they’re unregulated, we scrape company information to give you a best-fit sic code so you can target companies more efficiently. Additionally, when your sales team has identified prospective companies, our CRM can automatically target key decision-makers you need to speak to.

4. Enhance your sales team’s efficiency.

Using an API to automatically input data into your CRM is a way to increase the efficiency of your sales department.

This means sales personnel won’t need to input data themselves, freeing them up to focus their efforts on actual sales. When you consider that research suggests the average sales rep spends only 36% of their time actually selling (the majority on other non-selling activities such as administrative tasks, prospecting, and research), this could have a serious impact on sales team efficiency.

Additionally, if your business is having trouble getting your sales team to engage with the CRM, they may be more likely to do so if they feel that interacting with the CRM frees up their time so they can focus on selling. 

Often sales team can waste time pitching to people who aren’t decision-makers, Red Flag Alert when integrated with your CRM can provide you with the email addresses and LinkedIn profiles of the right people, as well as show information on company directors, shareholders, and UBOs.

Another issue sales teams can run into is spending time and money getting prospective clients sales-ready only for the credit department to find issues and shut the deal down creating internal hostility. With our system, you can experience frictionless alignment across your business.

Our innovative and unique health rating system can help you create sales lists, putting credit checks on the prospects side of the pipeline meaning you’re only selling to people who will pass your credit checks – also helping with your business risk appetite.

How Red Flag Alert can help.

The Red Flag Alert API can enrich your CRM with data on every business in the UK from ten high-quality sources. Our database updates in real-time with over 100,000 business changes daily, that’s 2M a month and 24 million changes a year.

Our API can be integrated with several popular CRMs, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho and more. We can show you how you can use our data in a way that provides the most value to your business and provide training to your sales team to ensure alignment across your business when it comes to using our data.

Red Flag Alert users benefit from:

• Access to our system’s industry-leading financial health ratings for over 5 million UK businesses.
• Over 100,000 updates per day and 50 new companies per month
• The ability to monitor the financial health of new and existing customers.
• A more complete picture of financial health than any standard credit reports.
• The ability to download credit reports in a variety of formats.
• The ability to filter sales prospects by credit status, making it easier to find customers in good financial shape.
• Instant access through your CRM using our API.

To learn how Red Flag Alert’s API can enrich your sales data, start your seven-day free trial today.