Today the very best sales teams are characterised by an ability to make informed decisions using accurate, real-time data.
The rest are often working on a speculative basis; they might have data on their clients, but it is usually out of date, incomplete, or inaccurate.
The elite teams know data can drive activity, helping to make informed decisions on the who, when, and how of sales.
Red Flag Alert helps you join the elite. Our database monitors 6.5 million businesses, and there are 100,000 updates every day. By providing monitoring alerts on this ever-changing data, sales teams can stay on the pulse of significant client and market changes and become highly targeted in their sales activity.
A sales trigger is a piece of information that opens up an opportunity to sell.
For example, one of the services offered by Red Flag Alert is Creditor Services data. Getting an alert that a business has recently received news of a bad debt gives the sales team a reason to get in touch – perfect for insurance, invoice financing and many other services.
Users can set up alerts and define monitoring parameters. These data pools can be viewed in different ways – for example, looking at revenue trends over time.
This enables you to be on the phone, talking to your customer before anyone else. In the UK today, 99% of businesses aren’t doing this, but if you’re in the 1% that is doing it, then the whole of the market is open to you.
An insurance provider may use Red Flag Alert to monitor company growth in terms of net worth and business asset value.
A suitable sales trigger for this could be when a company files its annual accounts. A business in this position may be seeking to adjust its insurance to reflect growth – so this would be the perfect time to get in touch and offer a free insurance review to provide a more suitable insurance package.
The range of different sales triggers are as varied as the businesses that use them – two businesses in the same sector may have an entirely different approach, depending on what data helps them make sales. Below is a list of some of the most common sales triggers:
Red Flag Alert collects a range of metrics that indicate business growth, including revenue, profitability and net assets. Finding growing businesses is important for anyone who sells services to support growth like marketing, finance or leasing.
New businesses are being opened at the rate of 50,000 a month. These businesses need a raft of services, and while many start-ups don’t have huge budgets, there are certain services they generally need, like IT leasing, web development and software.
Red Flag Alert has the most sophisticated financial health rating system in the UK – these ratings collate all available data and predict the likelihood of insolvency. Companies with poor financial health ratings are perfect prospects for businesses that offer relevant services like insolvency, low-budget alternatives or leasing.
Red Flag Alert can capture the data of every company operating in a specific region. Access to this information allows businesses to make sure they are targeting all relevant local companies and not wasting time on dissolved businesses or those that are outside its areas of operations.
If your business helps address working capital issues like invoice financing, outsourcing or logistics, using Red Flag Alert means you can zero in on businesses that are having liquidity issues. You could build a sales list that looks at businesses with constant liquidity issues and approach them with your solution.
Businesses with cash reserves may be good prospects for anyone who provides a service to deploy excess capital like investment advisors, financial planning or high-end marketing agencies.
Zeroing in on companies that carry lots of stock is a good sales strategy for those businesses that offer warehousing, insurance, distribution or provide wholesale products. Searches can be developed in certain industries, so a wholesaler in furniture can find relevant retailers which invest large amounts in stock and thus build a valuable prospect list.
Businesses that hold a lot of assets may be useful for many different services, from equipment leasing to cleaning. For example, in the hotel industry, if a business owns a large amount of physical assets they may be a good target for insurance brokers, finance businesses that offer equity release deals, or estate agents looking to help acquire the hotel’s next property.
Red Flag Alert has detailed information on 20 million decision-makers and indicates when an owner holds multiple directorships – this can be an excellent opportunity for cross-selling and finding new opportunities within a current client base.
For any business looking to branch out and offer its services into a new sector, Red Flag Alert is the perfect tool. All businesses are filtered by sector, so building a target sales list is simple.
In this article, we’ve shown how Red Flag Alert’s up-to-date data and flexible monitoring capability provides the intelligence for making rapid and informed business decisions.
For your sales team, this is a decisive competitive advantage that allows them to go directly to the best opportunities and ultimately allows them to join the country’s 1% of elite sales teams.
To learn how Red Flag Alert’s B2B prospector tool can help your business grow, get started with a free trial.