A Q&A with CareerBuilder's Director of Sales Productivity
CareerBuilder, the global leader in human capital solutions, has evolved over recent years to better meet marketplace demands. "We've moved from transactional advertising sales to a software solution, which is much more complex with a longer sales process and a longer sales cycle," says Maggie Palumbo, Director of Sales Productivity for CareerBuilder.
With that, it is critical that the sales teams Palumbo works with must be armed not only with information on which accounts to target, but also with intelligence they can use to approach - and engage - the potential customer.
More, as they continue to expand globally, their need for consistent data and CRM consolidation has become a priority. Establishing one system whereby employees all see the same information better positions the company for continued global expansion through more informed decision-making.
We talked with Palumbo about how she has been leading this effort.
What are you focused on now as you look to your priorities moving forward?
In the past, we did not have much in the way of governance. We had loose rules and accounts ended up not being fully optimized. We're focused now on better segmentation to figure out where we can get the best return.
We use tools from Dun & Bradstreet to help us accomplish this goal. Specifically, we rely on geographical information, SIC codes for industry, employee total and other predictive elements. Then we bring it all together to get a score that tells us which accounts to target and where it belongs within our business.
How do you make the information actionable?
We are unique in that we take the full D&B marketable file, companies with more than 11 employees, and pass it along to a sales representative. Some reps, those with accounts with fewer than 500 employees, have thousands of accounts. What they need to know is where to focus within that account base. Scoring and intelligence allows us to highlight the gems within the pile that may have otherwise been neglected. The reps at the higher end of the business have fewer accounts and require more intelligence on each account to enable more informed sales calls.
Because we've moved from a transactional advertising sales model to one based on software solutions, our sales process is now more complex. The reps need intelligent information that they can rely on as they adjust their sales efforts to this new approach.
How do you make sure you're actually uncovering new and unique opportunities?
We've gone more in-depth with our scoring and now pull in more elements. We also work with third party partners who do much of the manual digging. With that, we're confident that we're uncovering opportunities others may not necessarily see.
How do you marry together the data with the technology?
When the economy went south, our business could have been in big trouble. We are CareerBuilder. For a business whose focus is on hiring, and you're in an economy when far fewer companies are hiring, where do you go with that?
Our CEO is forward-thinking and already started to expand our business to include human capital data solutions. With that, it became clear that we needed to have standardized data, which we do via our data warehouse. Once the data is normalized and set up properly, it can be pushed into the systems. Pulling the information from different sources together into one record is the challenge. We use Integration manager for that; the D-U-N-S Number serves as a framework for how we segment our data and we rely heavily on that insight.
How does Dun & Bradstreet data help within your sales force?
Data we get from Dun & Bradstreet provides us with excellent insight. While the reps may not care about the D-U-N-S Number, per se, they do care about the hierarchical information it may reveal-particularly with the growth of mergers and acquisitions over the past few years.
What other aspects of your work with Dun and Bradstreet have evolved?
We are a global company, but we are segmented. As we move everyone across the globe onto one CRM platform, we are creating more transparency. That is our goal. In order for people within the organization to effectively partner with each other, they must see the same information, including hierarchical structure. D&B has helped us bring that information together and identify those global hierarchies.
Tell me more about how linkage has helped you.
We used to be all over the place, with multiple CRMs across the organization globally. Some were even homegrown. We also wanted to get a better view on hierarchies. We lacked insight of what was going on with a company across multiple companies and therefore couldn't leverage that information. We had to bring it all together through linkage. We've made great progress in terms of the global hierarchy and global organizational structure, and we couldn't have done it without D&B.
Parting Words
As CareerBuilder continues to grow globally and evolve as a company to meet customer needs and demands of the marketplace, aligning the sales process with actionable intelligence is critical to its forward-moving trajectory. "It's all about fully optimizing the data that's available to us so that we can focus our efforts on where we can get the most return for the company," said Palumbo.