Inexhaustible Data Opportunities

A new product from LexisNexis Risk Solutions monitors newly listed homes for sale on behalf of home insurance companies to alert them when a customer is preparing to move. The insurer can use this advance notice to contact these customers to help retain their business. 

This is a great idea. For a long time now, data companies have offered so-called “new mover” databases, identifying people who have recently moved into a new home. These are prime prospects because they’re in the market for all sorts of things, sometimes urgently, meaning the first offer they get stands a strong chance of being accepted.

This LexisNexis product shows how to combine databases to up your game. What could be a better prospect than a new mover? How about a pre-mover! While LexisNexis is focused on insurance companies, there are all sorts of companies that would be very interested to have at-risk current customers identified for them so that they can focus their customer retention efforts.

What makes this big leap in sales targeting possible isn't cutting edge technology in this case. It’s having the insight to see that data produced by one type of organization (in this case real estate agents) is valuable to another type of organization (in this case, insurance companies). Add in some additional value by matching the database of one organization to the database of another, and you almost assuredly have a nice business opportunity for the taking.

That’s what is so exciting and fun about the data business today: with so many new databases coming together, opportunity is everywhere. The key is to look at every new database you see and ask, “who else could use these data, and what could I do to these data to make them even more valuable to others?”

The people who create databases are almost always trying to solve a specific, single problem or need. Flip, spin, match or sometimes simply re-sort these databases, and you can often solve someone else’s problem or need. Am I talking about what’s known as data exhaust? To some extent yes, but some of the biggest and most interesting opportunities are right in front of us in plain sight – far less complex and challenging than most of the data exhaust opportunities I have seen.

Getting Inside the Head of a Sales Prospect

B2B prospect identification and targeting has come a long way in the last few years. Things that once seemed impossible are now taken for granted. We can now identify with some precision when someone in a company is actively in the market for a new product. We can take this purchase interest information and bump it against company firmographic data to help qualify and score this individual as a lead. We can easily review the business contacts of this person to see if we know people in common. We can view the work history of this person, and even order a deep background report based on public domain data. We can order an organization chart for this person’s company to understand where he or she fits in the hierarchy of the business, as well as to identify other possible purchase influencers. Pretty impressive, right?

But what if we could go further? What if we could get something close to a psychological profile of the prospect to better understand how to interact with that person to advance the sales conversation. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there is a company working on it.

The company is called CaliberMind. By mining public domain data, email exchanges with the prospect and even recorded telephone conversations with the prospect (prior consent to recording is required by Caliber Mind), CaliberMind can provide a salesperson with deep and unique insights into the personality and motivations of the prospect, along with recommendations on how to engage them most productively.

Yes, there is an inherently creepy aspect to this, but CaliberMind stresses it only works with public information and freely shared information between the salesperson and prospect. What it does, besides mining these information nuggets, is interprets them in order to build a deep profile of the prospect and specific tips on how to accelerate the sales process. Not surprisingly, the company was founded by former intelligence agents.

This is cutting-edge stuff from a young company, but in many respects it seems to be the logical culmination of the various selling tools that have been introduced over the past few years. CaliberMind is leveraging both increased computing power and the explosion of public domain information to help inform and accelerate the B2B sales selling process. CaliberMind also represents just one more piece of evidence that data opportunities are everywhere – and that the tools needed to collect, process and apply data continue to get more and more powerful.

Make the Product, Not Just the Raw Material

Twitter exhausts me. Even though I feel I have been very selective in who I choose to follow, the volume is overwhelming. Every time I go to review my Twitter feed, I waste far too much time in an exercise to separate the wheat from the chaff to find useful nuggets of news or insight. Twitter ought to be incredibly valuable, but in its current design, users find that to overcome the sheer volume of tweets to get noticed, they have to pump out an increasing number of tweets themselves. It’s an endless game of volumetric one-upmanship that is ultimately self-defeating.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal takes the view that Twitter is very good as a raw content creation platform, but a failure at making that content useful or even intelligible. We know that Twitter content has value: consider the number of companies looking for trends, breaking news and other signals to gain an edge and generate profits. But it is companies other than Twitter that are adding the value and making the money.

This got me to thinking. Many data publisher still focus on the quantity of the data they provided, not its value. And this inevitably leads to a mentality of selling data by the pound. These publishers deliver lots of data, and their customers figure out what to do with it. For a long time, this was a good business approach for publishers, but hardly an optimized one.

By wrapping their content in software, publishers have added value by allowing customers to act on their data more powerfully. But while data-software integration has been a boon for data publishers, there may still be entirely new products and even entirely new businesses hiding in your data. There are clues to this. Do you have lots of consultants buying your data year after year? Do they renew easily, rarely complaining about price increases? Chances are at least a few of them are productizing your data in some way. Get familiar with their specialties and their services, and you can often come away with new product ideas.

Have you ever changed your file layouts or stopped delivering a specific data field, only to get immediate panic calls from some of your customers? Chances are, they’ve built software around your content and are doing something very valuable with it. A few casual inquiries about how they’re using your data will often yield tremendous insights. Do you have whole categories of customers where you have no idea why they buy your data? Chances are, it will be worth your time to find out. It’s not unusual to find that markets you never considered are making valuable use of your data.

Data-software integration is great, but in the majority of cases, publishers are simply helping their customers better manipulate their data. But there’s a whole additional of level of value that can be created by turning your data into finished products. And while I am not arguing that you should try to run all your customers out of business, if some of them have found a way to make money by re-formatting, augmenting or manipulating your data to add value to it, I’d argue that such opportunities properly belong to the owner of that data. And your subscriber file is often the first best place to look for clues to such opportunities.

Credit Scores: Not Just for Credit Anymore

A credit score, like it or not, is something that exists for all of us. Pioneered by a company called Fair Isaac (now just known as FICO), the credit score provided powerful advantages to credit granters in two key ways. First, using massive samples of consumer payment data, FICO analysts were able to tease out what characteristics were predictive of an individual’s willingness to re-pay their debts. With this knowledge, the company built sophisticated algorithms to automatically assess and score consumers. This approach is obviously more efficient than manual credit reviews by humans, but it offered consistency and dependability as well. Second, FICO reduces your credit history to a single number in a fixed range. The higher the number, the better your credit. This innovation made it possible for banks and other to write software to offer instant credit decisions, online credit approvals and more. Moreover, a consistent national scoring system made it easy for banks to both manage and benchmark their credit portfolios, as well as watch for early signs of credit erosion.

There’s little doubt that credit scoring was a brilliant innovation, but is it so specialized it can’t be replicated elsewhere? Well, it appears that creative data types are seeing scoring opportunities everywhere these days.

Consider just one example: computer network security scores. There are several companies (and FICO just acquired one of them) that use a variety of publicly available inputs to score the computer networks of companies to assess their vulnerability to hackers. Is this even possible to do? A lot of smart people in the field say it is, and pretty much everyone agrees the need is so great that even if these scores aren’t perfect, they’re better than nothing.

You may also be asking whether or not there is a business opportunity here and indeed there is. Companies buy their own scores to assess how they are doing and to benchmark themselves against their peers. Insurance companies writing policies to cover data hacks and other cybercrimes are desperate for these objective assessments. And increasingly, companies are asking potential vendors to provide them with their scores to make sure all their vendors are taking cybersecurity seriously.

While scoring started with credit, it certainly doesn’t end there. Are there scoring opportunities in your own market? Put on your thinking cap and get creative!

Time to Get a New Address?

I’ve long been fascinated by unique identifier systems, because while often hard to implement, they can provide enormous value and constitute a great business opportunity. We’re all familiar with the D&B DUNS system, but there are far more identifier systems in use in vertical markets than you might expect. Don’t, for example, try to publish a book without an ISBN number. Similarly, don’t try to get into the advertising specialties business without an ASI number.

Identifier systems are not just for companies. They exist for people too. Physicians in the U.S. have government-issued unique identifiers. LexisNexis has implemented a similar private sector solution for lawyers called the International Standard Lawyer Number (ISLN). And we’re all of course familiar with Social Security numbers. For geographic locations, think about such identifiers as ZIP codes and their value in identifying specific geographic areas.

The power of unique identifiers is that that they serve as a sort of numeric lingua franca. Everyone agrees that a specific company, person or location is identified by a single permanent identifier. This removes ambiguity. It makes all sorts of transactions easier and more efficient. It allows for better and more precise record-keeping. And in this data-centric age, it makes matching of datasets easier and more precise. If everyone can agree on a unique identifier system, all sorts of things happen more easily and smoothly. Needless to say, the operator of the identifier system is in a powerful and lucrative position.

But how ambitious can you get with a non-governmental unique identifier system? After all, if you can’t mandate adoption of your identifiers, you’ve got to build voluntary participation. That’s tough in a narrow, vertical market. Imagine trying to build participation on a broad-based, global basis.

That’s why we were intrigued to run across perhaps the most ambitious attempt at a unique identifier system we have seen. It’s operated by a company called What3Words. Its goal is to assign a unique identifier to every inch of the planet, in 3 meter square blocks. Further, much like the Internet’s Domain Name System, What3Words assigns each block a three-word name instead of numbers, believing the system will be easier to use with words rather than hard to remember random numbers or latitude and longitude coordinates.

You may be saying, “cool, but who needs this?” Well, start with obvious examples of aid agencies trying to serve areas of rural Africa, where no neat systems like ZIP codes exist. Indeed, the founders of Just3Words are quick to note that 75% of the population of the earth essentially don’t exist because they have no physical address. Similarly, hikers and travelers will benefit from being able both to find and describe remote areas. And with much talk of delivery by drones in the near future, a uniform global geo-identifier could be very useful. A consistent system also benefits government administration, development of consistent and comparable statistics, and much more. Those of us who regularly deal with international addresses know they are an inconsistent mess, and these are addresses in advanced, developed countries. There are vast swaths of the planet that still lack addressing systems at all.

It’s a big project, but there’s a big need. And hopefully this brief overview inspires some big thinking about the potential of unique identifiers to make all kinds of activities take place more smoothly and efficiently, with some of those productivity savings accruing to the operator of the identifier system.