Accelerating Prospecting and Sales Operations at a Global Recruiting Firm

This large multi-faceted firm provides recruiting and headhunting services to thousands of clients worldwide. After years of acquiring other professional services businesses, the company lacked visibility into all its potential customer opportunities.

The commercial team needed a tool to provide company intelligence to support the enterprise-wide sales, marketing, and account management functions. The client research and sales teams felt a comprehensive platform with powerful screening tools, executive professional coverage, and curated alerts could help them find better prospects.

The company was a longstanding S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") client and reached out to learn more about the available data solutions and workflow tools.

Pain Points

The firm often competes against some of the largest consulting companies in the market, requiring their sales teams to have an edge when proposing services. But the nature of their multi-faceted organization meant that teams weren't always utilizing the same sources for client research, sometimes missing critical data which could have improved a client's proposal.

Specifically, their teams needed to:

1. Know Prospects Inside and Out – The client research and sales teams wanted a comprehensive tool for more in-depth research when examining prospects and targets.
2. Conceptualize Executive and Business Relationships – The teams needed an understanding of relationships and links between company entities and their key leaders to identify potential targets for recruiting and headhunting services.
3. Monitor and Pivot Efficiently – The firm needed more awareness around major developments at client firms and changes in the market so that they could quickly pinpoint opportunities to support executive changes, restructuring, new market expansions, and more.
   
   

Overall, the firm and its sales leadership team saw the importance of enabling streamlined prospecting workflows. The S&P Capital IQ Pro platform allowed multiple commercial teams to collaborate and explore corporate insights, ideate in response to market events, and ultimately drive the firm's business development goals forward.

Figure 1 - S&P Capital IQ Pro's news and analysis on market and company activity, linked to key company data.

The Solution

S&P Capital IQ Pro is a leading web-based platform for essential intelligence. From its unrivaled breadth and depth of data across sectors and industries, commercial teams can distill several critical corporate insights useful for driving sales initiatives to capture revenue and win new business.

Millions of data points on public and private company financials, estimates, ownership, transactions, and market developments helped this client to:

Prospect Better: S&P Capital IQ Pro's Company Screener tool provides users with a comprehensive menu for identifying targets using keywords, topics, industries, geography, financial metrics, and more. Searches can also be saved as dynamic lists, updating as new firms meet the criteria, and constantly identifying new opportunities. With coverage of public companies and over 52 million private firms, the client could expand a wider net to build a sales pipeline.

Build Relationship Maps: Users can take advantage of the Corporate Hierarchy and Key Professionals data within a company profile to better understand dynamics within a target organization. For a headhunting firm, the client needed to take advantage of Capital IQ Pro's Professionals coverage to flag existing executives, historical roles, board membership, and educational background. With these details at their fingertips, the client could identify new potential candidates for their headhunting business, and flag when firms might need their recruiting services.

Break Through the Noise: Users can identify opportunities for follow-up with Key Developments, News, and Events, updated across thousands of companies daily. The client felt the curated nature of Market Intelligence's Key Developments would help with categorizing and prioritizing the most pressing follow-ups, whether it was a change at the C-suite, a new strategic alliance, or a reorganization. Additionally, a global newsroom of more than 250 journalists could provide deep insights into fast-changing sectors, allowing the client's sales teams to be more prepared when speaking with prospects.

Market Intelligence described three key capabilities in the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform to address the firm's needs:

	Utilize comprehensive company and professional screening tools to identify targets.
	Leverage company intelligence, hierarchy, and professionals data profiled for bespoke proposals and client engagements.
	Monitor key developments for major opportunities to identify new clients, candidates, and more.

Key Benefits

As an existing Market Intelligence customer, the recruiting firm was excited to expand its access to S&P Capital IQ Pro for new teams. They had a history with the platforms and trusted the data.

The overall expertise and knowledge of the existing Market Intelligence account team reinforced the client's appreciation of high-quality customer service and the data solutions provided. With their improved workflows, they could:

• More effectively target new prospects and find essential data points for outreach. Teams could identify companies, transactions, and other detailed assets that mattered to their outreach initiatives, quickly filtering with various corporate criteria.
• The commercial organization could prepare and maintain polished presentations for their clients with the Office Tools plug-in that would build and update visually pleasing, consistent presentation templates directly within PowerPoint.
• Teams could turn around pitches more efficiently with corporate standardization features, integrated charts, visuals, and deeper insights into business and professional relationships, giving the firm a commercial edge.
• Multiple team members could collaborate on a single platform that acted as a single source of truth to coordinate prospecting efforts, share searches, target lists, and reports to enable the flow of data insights.
  
  

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