wattline: With a lot of energy and always up-to-date B2B data to the strongest purchasing community for electricity and gas
Flashback to 2011: More than a decade after the successful founding of wattline in 1999, the company has a B2B data pool of around 100,000 pieces of customer and potential data.
During this phase, wattline discovers that there are a number of errors in the database and that there is no comprehensive overview of the up-to-dateness and quality of the existing B2B data. This is not surprising at first, as there are around 1 million change notifications at German companies every year.
Milestones
How the regular use of current B2B potential to acquire new customers and automated data maintenance in your own CRM lead to success.
Know all active customers and relevant potentials with a maximum referencing rate.
Enrichment of the database with the desired firmographic characteristics plus the Crefonumber.
Upload option for high-quality address lists if required, including definition of the quality and information standard.
Self-service use of the beAddress store, selection of over 100 criteria from five million B2B addresses.
Identify, check and update in your own CRM at the touch of a button.
System-supported new address creation without loss of quality and in a short time.
The challenges
Address quality is noticeable in sales work for new customer acquisition, e.g. in the processing of direct mailings or in telemarketing.
There are too many returns with the note undeliverable, unknown or moved, telephone numbers are incorrect or not available at all.
Many potentials cannot be assigned an economic key figure, the size or sales relevance is not recognizable. Insolvent companies also make operational sales work more difficult.
wattline decides to look for an experienced address service provider – and quickly finds one in beDirect.
beDirect is one of the leading providers of address management and data quality services in Germany. The services that the company offers business customers include the beDirect address store with over 5 million addresses, the beDirect reference database with over 18 million addresses, automated new customer creation, clearing teams and integration solutions, for example for Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce CRM.
In a nutshell: This is wattline
wattline GmbH, part of the Praml Group, is the strongest purchasing group for electricity and gas for small and medium-sized companies based in the Bavarian Forest. The company was founded in 1999 at the same time as the liberalization of the electricity market, and since then the owner-managed company has been independent of the large energy companies.
Further locations in Leipzig and Salzburg followed. More than 150 employees are now responsible for € 1.5 billion in energy costs.
But what convinced wattline to work with us? The first step was to carry out an address audit, an anonymized analysis of the current status of the database. Around 100,000 B2B data (including around 30,000 master data) were transferred to beDirect in a process that was clearly defined in terms of data protection law.
What is checked during an address audit? Address audit with important results provides information
- Incorrect spellings in the company name and company name are pointed out.
- Company addresses are checked for relocation or relocation.
- The postal correctness of the B2B data is checked.
- The company status for insolvencies/deletions is marked.
- Intra-duplicates & hidden duplicates are identified & marked.
- Enrichment options, e.g. the credit reference number, as a reference key to the Creditreform information database incl. Information on payment history and creditworthiness.
"In a constantly changing market like ours, it is important not to lose sight of the B2B potential. Thanks to the service provider beDirect, we were able to successfully raise our strategy for acquiring new customers in Germany to a new level many years ago thanks to the first-class address quality. Particularly valuable are the additional features of the reference database, which we can select optionally and flexibly depending on the order and which are always adapted to the target group."
The result
The results of the analysis were used to derive the next steps for the initial cleansing of the master data as well as the to-do’s for optimizing the potential for acquiring new customers.
One of the recommendations from the audit was that the identified
Remove duplicates and correct postal addresses, add telephone numbers or include important legal form information on request.
There were also options to add valuable information to the history that was still missing and to store the Crefo numbers for the finance department.
Successful together for 12 years
Today, wattline uses beDirect’s integration solution from its own CRM to maintain its own B2B database and create new data records – in the case of wattline, a connection to Microsoft Dynamics was implemented at the time.
Following a system change, the company is currently working successfully with Zoho CRM, thus utilizing the possibilities of the beDirect integration solution.
In order to drive new customer acquisition at industry level, wattline has found it useful to compile B2B lists as required in the upload.
This enables customer service to offer customized solutions that meet the needs of the target group. This means shorter decision-making processes for the customer and a clear competitive edge for wattline as well as a faster route to future customers.
At the same time, access to the store www.beAddress.de which wattline uses regularly, and where the feature information and possible address manges can be called up at the touch of a button.
- Bakeries
- Sales volume
- Employees > x
- Decision maker
This information can be used to calculate the expected energy consumption.
This gives wattline the best key figures to offer an attractive solution.
There was also the option to add valuable information to the history that was still missing and to use the option to store the Crefo number for the finance department.
The bakery sector is an attractive target group for acquiring new customers through direct marketing: bakeries of a certain size have a high energy requirement, even at night. Potentials that can be made available result from the association list.
Conclusion
With the data solutions described, wattline has been able to efficiently increase the performance of marketing and sales over time, including cost and time savings. Particularly important in this context is the flexible adaptation of additional features resulting from the target group analysis in the context of new customer acquisition.
