When targeting prospective clients, it’s crucial to know your audience. If the only information you have about a business is that it comes under the generic classification of ‘Agriculture’ or ‘IT services,’ it’s going to be difficult to build a targeted campaign that really addresses your prospect’s needs.
A successful B2B sales team will zero in on those prospects that have the strongest needs for its product or service, but it can be difficult to do this with basic SIC codes that provide only minimal information about companies.
Why are Accurate SIC Codes so Important?
Highly specific SIC codes are more essential than you might think, and can save you valuable time and money by helping you to target the businesses that need your services the most. Having detailed information about a company and its key activities can really help your sales prospecting efforts.
Understanding exactly what the company does enables you to focus on the elements of your product that will appeal to them the most so you can highlight this in sales outreach and messaging.
As well as being extremely useful for creating precisely targeted marketing campaigns, accurate SIC codes can also be used for analytics and, thanks to Red Flag Alert’s unique business health algorithm, to calculate credit limits. They also allow for a greater understanding of what a company does in a supply chain, and are critical for compliance and an accurate FATCA classification.
All of this information is really useful when you’re making decisions about whether a company could be a valuable client and if there are any potential risks involved.
With this in mind, take a minute to think about where your current SIC codes come from. Chances are that they’re from company registries, telephone interviews or assignment models using keywords. Although each of these sources can provide useful information, it tends to be generic and might not be fully accurate or up to date.
How Does it Work?
That’s where Red Flag Alert’s precise, granular SIC codes come in. Our codes are created using cutting-edge technology, natural language processing and machine learning to enable computers to understand the meaning of words in context and create highly specific SIC codes as a result. These are much more detailed than standard Companies House codes, and can instantly provide a much better idea of what a company actually does.
Our codes are created by inputting existing data into a word cloud, creating billions of connections and assigning SIC codes via artificial intelligence. Extensive QA testing is carried out on random samples of SICs by experts (real humans) to check their accuracy and that everything is working as it should.
Now we know a little about how the codes are generated, let’s focus on how they can dramatically increase your sales. Let’s say that the SIC code you have for a company is 95 – Repair of computers and personal and household goods. It’s a useful starting point, but the classification is pretty vague and doesn’t give us any real clues as to exactly what type of repairs the company offers.
Using our innovative technology, entering the same company into our SIC database returns a result of 95.23 - Repair of footwear and leather goods. This immediately gives us much more information and allows us to target our campaign to a business that we know specifically repairs shoes and leather rather than computers – two rather different businesses that will likely need a very different marketing message.
By providing more granular information about businesses and their activities, we can understand them better from the start and work with their best interests in mind.
The Value to Your Business
So how can our data help your business? As well as our highly accurate SIC codes, Red Flag Alert provides precise real-time data for every business in the UK. Our system generates 100,000+ updates every day, ensuring that our information is always current and correct.
Our intelligent business tool helps you to segment your customers and to manage risk using our unique financial health ratings, which provide real-time changes in a company’s business (e.g. a new director or an increase in capital expenditure) that may make them more receptive to your offering.
Our data (greatly helped by accurate and detailed SIC codes) helps you find new customers that are a perfect fit for your product, giving you all the information you need to create winning sales presentations that specifically target their needs.
If you’d like to learn more about how Red Flag Alert’s highly accurate SIC codes and extensive database of UK businesses could help your company to grow. Learn how Red Flag Alert’s B2B prospector tool can help your business grow, get started with a free trial.
