Alternative Public Data - Is It For Me? ??
Are you sweating because of this wonderful summer's dog days heat, because of the uncertainty imposed by all of this "new normal" that we still cannot seem to get used to or because your Key Performance Indicators and Operational Key Results are nowhere near where they should be this time of year? After all, the first six months have raced by and there's only so much more runway to leave your dent in this year's bottom-line. As this is exactly the situation most companies (FinTechs, Banks and Insurances alike) find themselves in, I want to talk about possible ways to fill up your deal pipeline and put some action into that prospect funnel of yours. Here are three sure-fire ways you can turn up the heat on your sales:
- Show your clients & prospects shortcuts to their ultimate target state —> Who said there are no shortcuts? ???♂?
- Start speaking to a different crowd —> Did I hear you say "What crowd would that be?" ??♀?
- Become more granular & concise in your existing offer —> No, you're not doing that already! ?
Let me step you through these thoughts at a bit more granular level of detail:
Alternative public data as a shortcut to the desired target state - most of us have been conditioned to design and apply structured processes to come from the starting point (A) to endpoint (B) by applying actions 1 through n. And often our clients and prospects are not clear enough or patient enough to do just that. Instead, they are calling for quick wins and experiments and those can be your lever to make use of alternative public data:
- Explore the social graph of your existing clients to evaluate their potential for referrals
- Find out which focus topics are critical to whom amongst your clients when. Then use the next instance an event occurs that fit those focus topics to offer your help.
- Assess which of your products & services can be expanded to new uses by evaluating public discussions around your focus topics
Addressing a new community using alternative public data - taking the reverse stance is to leverage public data in order to analyse and x-ray a new user or partner community you have decided might be interested. Usually, these communities have some common public forums or digital outlets that can be tapped into, to profile and assess the likelihood of success when trying to approach them with your core or side offering:
- Use publicly available lists of associations, trade registers or similar domain-specific nature to find the most viable outlets of alternative data for your case
- Start to engage in some of these outlets to create your own natural footprint and social network within these digital town-squares
- Join up your lead paths from these sources in a probabilistic prioritisation with your existing/organic sales activities
Driving home details on the back of alternative public data - a third successful and straight-forward approach to using public data is to support your product & service claims with more fundamental evidence as to why they work and how your value add translates into real economic benefits for your clients.
- Monitor and screen new studies, reports or white papers that strengthen the best practices around and features of your product
- Become a trendsetter by extrapolating current state practices and fast forward them 3 to 5 years into the future
- Show how different demographies react in different ways to a certain type of messaging
So what is alternative public data anyway? We have read about many possible examples, but if the harvesting and using of public data is as easy as it sounds, why is not everyone doing it? Because it is not easy and requires both creativity to find well-suited use cases and some extreme experimentation to assess which hypothesis actually holds true business promise. And as soon as you start to buy your alternative data from big and common market data providers, it looses one fundamental attribute - it is not alternative any more but becomes mainstream. Take the ESG (Environment, Society and Governance) data as a famous example. Virtually all of the known market data providers claim to have the best "alternative" coverage. But as soon as you start looking into their detailed catalogues, you see mostly commonplace and replaceable content. The key to alternative data is its originality and freshness. Originality means it's not readily available to everybody but ideally curated in a way that fits your distinct purpose. And freshness means it is not created using manual work and research because then it doesn't scale and it usually is not economically viable. There are many resources out there you can explore but one of the most mature is the Open Data Institute which hosts events and projects and also has quite a vibrant community of active members.
If you are interested in evaluating how alternative public data can make a difference to your business, to your clients and the products you offer, let's have a chat. This can be turned from idea to innovation in a couple of weeks. And if you have some successful examples showcasing how you applied alternative public data in your context, I'd be very interested to learn about it. Maybe we can bring it to even more people.
Stay safe, enjoy the ride & hope to talk soon.
— Tom Debus
P.S. And should you chew your yummy lunch wondering where FinTech meets Philosophy, listen to our "Hole in the Whole" podcast.