Savvy businesses now realize that data acquisition is extremely important to stay competitive within their markets. However, because this is becoming a common practice, simply acquiring data sets will not provide the competitive edge that companies are hoping to generate. In this interview with Jim Currie, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Information Evolution, Inc. (IEI), we learn what IEI is doing to help their clients gain an advantage over the competition.
Could you provide a brief overview of the service/solution that IEI provides?
Jim: Broadly, IEI provides data management services. This means data acquisition and monitoring, data cleansing, data appending, etc. We combine cutting-edge data monitoring technology with experienced human resources to solve data challenges. We fill the void where automation and technology reach their limits and in-house labor is far too expensive to utilize at scale. Being successful often requires trusted, experienced partners to help maintain your core asset – your data – and that’s where IEI comes in.
What kind of situations do your clients typically come to you with?
Jim: Sometimes our clients have a general notion of what they want but don’t know what data is available and we help them to identify the sources that will help them to achieve their goals. Other times they have incredibly specific data needs. Our projects run the spectrum from wholesale database creation to specific “fill in the gap” projects. We provide the data to visualize, analysis is atypical, but done for some with highly client directed specs.
How does your solution help your clients make better decisions?
Jim: Our data content clients – people who sell data products at the core of their business – help their customers make better decision because the time of data availability and the scale of data coverage have been dramatically improved. Our clients who leverage our customer relationship management (CRM) data services make better business investments and decisions because we have provided more robust data on a more frequent basis.
Tell me about the coolest client example you can think of. Tell me about the sources of Web data and how did you help the client make better business decisions?
Jim: Our Connotate implementations often revolve around monitoring sites for executive changes that are rapidly incorporated into our clients’ product. Their clients expect highly visible exec changes (CEO of IBM) to be incorporated quickly since every major media website will carry this news. However our clients were able to differentiate themselves from competitors by rapid updates of lower level exec changes (VP of Channel Sales). The Connotate machine learning, web scraping software enabled our small data provider clients to win more business because of these more frequent updates.
How does your partnership with Connotate allow you to provide better solutions to your customers?
Jim: The access to rapidly refreshed data enables our customers to separate themselves in their respective markets, driving renewal rates, customer acquisition, and brand value.
Our partnership with Connotate also allows us to differentiate business proposals by offering more frequent refreshes while staying cost competitive with providers that offer fewer updates.
Awesome across the board!
Finally, what advice would you give someone who is ready to take on a project and might be able to leverage the Connotate and IEI partnership?
Jim: The more deeply we understand the business goals of the end product, the more collaborative a feed-back loop we begin with, the faster we can target, normalize and transform the data into a product deliverable that can help you to achieve your business goals. Ultimately, making yourself and key members of the team available early in the build process will produce the best results.
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