Better location data for your B2B business
Most companies define their ideal customer profile by using the “Big Three'' firmographic data points: Industry, company size, and location. Moreover, these data points also play an important role in other internal processes, such as territory planning and assigning opportunities to the right teams.
In previous posts, we’ve discussed industry data and organization size indicators, but now we’ll dive deeper into location data.
Territory planning is based on the headquarters’ location
The single most important location data point is the location of the company’s headquarters. Most companies will assign prospects to their regional sales reps based on the location of the prospect’s HQ. Shopify is headquartered in Canada, so it will most likely be assigned to a Canadian or North American sales team. Spotify has its headquarters in Sweden, so it will often be approached by Swedish and Nordic sales teams.
Human psychology is a complex thing and beyond the scope of this article, but a potential factor in business unfolding this way is that people generally respond more favorably to people that are in some way similar to them. So, having the salesperson that contacts the prospect be from the same region as them is an easy way to take advantage of that human heuristic.
Of course, it’s unlikely that’s the only factor for such a business decision, but the point is that companies do allocate prospects to their sales team based on location, and it’s likely that they do it because it leads to better financial outcomes than alternative allocation strategies. Which is all to say that it's beneficial for businesses to know the HQ location of a prospect and allocate accordingly.
However, knowing the location of the headquarters can be tricky, even for people who know the company well. A company could be founded in Norway, transfer its HQ operations to the US, all while having a holding company registered in the Netherlands. On LinkedIn, the company might then pick the US as the location of its HQ even if the official HQ is in the Netherlands, and many people still think of it as a Norwegian company because that’s where it all started. Vainu Global is built around website URLs, which means we’re not processing official legal entities but rather asking a question, what’s the HQ location of this internet entity?
Vainu Global is built around website URLs, which means we’re not processing official legal entities but rather asking a question, what’s the HQ location of this internet entity?
If we use Drift—a conversational marketing and sales technology company—as an example, it’s quite straightforward to determine that the company is based in Boston, MA, US. That’s what they have listed on Linkedin, it’s the first address mentioned on their ‘contact us’ page, and it’s the first address mentioned on the privacy policy page.
But, Drift also mentions several other cities and countries on their website. For companies that are selling to regional buying centers, knowing all the business locations and countries of operations can be highly important.
Other business locations & countries of operations
Most CRMs only have enough default properties for one location; there are typically data properties available for address, postal, city, state, and country. But, quite often, there isn’t any property for data points such as “number of offices” and “countries of operations”.
As mentioned earlier, if you’re selling a product or service where the buying decision is made on a business unit/regional level, having this type of data in your CRM is crucial. It helps your sales reps to pick upsell and cross-sell opportunities and in general, makes it easier to maximize the revenue potential of your customer portfolio.
For example, a recruitment company that has a good relationship with their US-based international customer will most likely find it useful to know that this customer also has offices in Germany, the UK, and Australia. Sales reps in those regions don’t have to start the process from scratch but can piggyback off the existing customer relationship that their organization has with the US business unit. Unfortunately, finding good data for regional offices has been challenging in the past. Most companies will only list their main office on their social media accounts, and it’s been difficult for salespeople to manually add office data from company websites to their business systems due to the limitations in the availability of data properties.
Vainu Global contains data on millions of companies with regional offices. We extract addresses from selected website sub-pages (such as “our offices”, “contact us”, etc.), and then use several different methods to parse country information from those addresses and also to pick the right office to be marked as the company’s headquarters.
If we use the same example as earlier, drift.com, we can see that they list several offices on their contact us page: Boston, Tampa, San Francisco, London, Sydney, and Guadalaraja. On LinkedIn, they just list 4 US cities, and CRM insights engines only provide the main location (Boston) but give no indication of the other offices. Further, if you rely on standard company data providers, the location you get depends on the legal entity you’re looking at, so, for example, if you happen to use the business ID of the company’s San Francisco office, then that’s the location you end up having in your records.
On the other hand, Vainu Global aims to identify all the addresses that are available on the company website and then selects the one with the highest likelihood of being the HQ location. Our HubSpot Connector also automatically creates new company properties in your CRM, which means that the “number of offices” and “countries of operations” data points are easily available for your sales and marketing people.
Vainu Global aims to identify all the addresses that are available on the company website and then selects the one with the highest likelihood of being the HQ location.
Try our location data for yourself
Vainu Global, including the location data, is now available for a free trial. You can search for all those 60M companies and all their data points. Our HubSpot Connector is also available, so you can check out how good of a match rate we would have with your CRM data for enrichment projects. If you have any questions, just send us a line via our chat!
