Generating sales leads through Market Intelligence program

The executive search firm’s best customers were international companies that are expanding to the firm’s region of operations. Such companies would require the firm’s services to hire. To identify such companies, the firm had analysts who were manually searching news and press announcements about business expansion. But this process was extremely challenging.

Here’s what Google turns up for search phrases like ‘companies expanding to India’ and ‘companies opening an office in India’

Their manual process was successful. The leads found through manual efforts had converted better than the ones sourced from expensive databases. But the manual process couldn’t scale without hiring analysts. In addition, the process was mentally exhausting resulting in a high churn amongst the analysts.

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Our methodology included configuring custom tags to identify hiring indicators and writing custom crawlers for aggregating new updates from “Registrar of Companies”. This is how we configured the Contify market intelligence platform to meet their exact requirement:

1. Identify hiring indicator: The executive search firm wanted to know which companies were planning to expand. But not just any business expansion, only those updates with companies that would soon be hiring. So we configured the custom tags to identify business expansion updates that indicated hiring and discarded the rest. These intelligent rules, trained by our analysts and fed into the machine learning algorithms surfaced news reports like:
   • Vision-Box to open new Office in India
   • NEC Corporation to set up NEC Laboratories India

   But more importantly, the rules were able to weed out expansion-based news reports that did not indicate a hiring intent. The platform, for instance, was also able to discard updates that were regional in nature. Here are some examples:

   • With non-smart TVs, Thomson looks to expand India market
   • Mercedes-Benz plans to make e-cars in Pune
   • EasyBuy opens store in Karimnagar
2. Developed custom scrapers/crawlers: Apart from tracking news and social updates, a fool-proof way of identifying companies setting up a presence in India is to track new foreign companies that are registering local entities with the Registrar of Companies in the country. The information is in the public domain but hard to get in an automated fashion because of the way the website has been designed and due to a lack of APIs. We wrote custom scrapers that could reliably source relevant updates from there. Additionally, our system had in-built triggers that would flag whenever there was an issue in getting the updates. Further, the information sourced from the website was in a difficult-to-read tabular format. Our system fed this tabular information into our platform and transformed it into an easy-to-read update. Here’s how this information looks inside Contify:

Using Contify, the firm was able to find several companies expanding to India that helped them build a sales pipeline worth $230,000 in the first two months itself. In addition, the analysts are happy that the grunt work is done by technology and they spend time researching companies, finding the right person to call, confirming hiring need, and giving the warm lead to the sales team. Contify’s competitive intelligence platform is now an integral part of the client’s lead generation process.