Growth Intelligence comes up with the `NACY’

Stopping cold calling in selling is obviously something that most people would vote for: they are unwelcome, time-consuming and often a pain in various parts of the anatomy. Finding oneself then the target of hopefully tightly focused sales calls might be a good deal better, but on initial evidence it has to be said it may not be.

Why is that? Well, a London-based start-up business, Growth Intelligence, is setting out with the honourable intention to `kill off cold-calling sales’. Its intention, however, is to replace that horror with tools to bring buyers and sellers together intelligently, by helping sales people target likely prospects more closely.

The company likens this to ‘Amazon Recommendations’ for sales, i.e. if you’ve sold to this company, here’s another you might like. It has to be said that, on initial impression of the idea, this makes it sound like it could be lukewarm calling at best, in that the recipient is likely to be more interesting and receptive, but not necessarily ready for any contact.

One way to consider it, therefore, is as the prequel to CRM: the NACY, or Not A Customer Yet service.

The GI service works using a variation on a theme by Google: that company’s ad auction algorithm, which brings advertisers and audiences together intelligently. The company’s efforts in this area can only be strengthened by the recent news that Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist and company lead on the design and refinement of Google’s ad auction algorithm has joined the Advisory Board of Growth Intelligence.

The GI software analyses a company’s previous clients and recommends today’s potential sales prospects culled from its core information resource, the constant tracking and analysing the `digital fingerprint’ of every company in the economy, in real-time.

This fingerprint that changes all the time, and just about every online activity, such as email traffic, road traffic logged from traffic cameras, import/export data, product reviews, comments, even the number of PCs they have connected to the web. It also includes up-to-the-minute information on the turnover and activities of every company.

To this can be then added a second component known as GI Pippistrelle, a small component inserted on to the website of a client company that logs the digital signatures of visitors to that website. This provides the all-important closing of the loop, for the best target customers are likely to be those with high levels of general activity and have staff that already looking at possible sources of products or services to help their own business growth.

The GI system analyses this this combination of data to build a picture of performance and activity which can be narrowed down to targeted companies in specific market sectors. To date the company’s focus has been on the financial services sector. But now it is looking to expand, and is looking to target firms right across telecoms, technology, real estate and insurance.

This is a big step-up from current enterprise sales methods in which companies hire call centres to phone thousands of companies in the hope that one or two are relevant.

“Hal’s work on ‘predicting the present’ was the inspiration behind the real-time tracking service we have developed which uses digital signatures to offer a more up-to-date view of business performance and activity,” said Thomas Gatten, founder of Growth Intelligence. “We are delighted he will be working closely with us to refine our software in a bid to kill off scattergun sales through better sales intelligence.”