Applications Administration Guide > D&B Integration >

Business Scenarios

The following scenarios describe how you can use D&B data in your company.

Build and Grow Current Customer Relationships

D&B data can help you find out how many relationships you already have within the complete corporate family structure. Use the D&B D-U-N-S number to view the organizational hierarchy of your clients and also to aggregate account attributes at all levels within your clients.

For example, you are selling to 20 IBM locations and you find out that there are locations that you have never contacted.

Following the completion of a successful sales engagement, use D&B demographic data to query your existing customer base for other customers in the same industry who are approximately the same size. This gives you a targeted population for replicating the success and driving revenue.

New Business or Customer Acquisition

Despite best efforts by an organization's marketing department, the sales organization is constantly asking for more leads. To partially address the issue, the company provides all salespeople access to the companies in the D&B database so they can generate prospects in their territory.

Individual salespeople can query the D&B database using criteria matching their ideal target to find new leads. After generating a list of leads, salespeople can automatically add the companies and contacts to their accounts.

Additionally, D&B demographic data can be used to analyze customer buying habits and then applied to the business universe to provide targeted marketing lists for specific campaigns or for distribution to the sales force.

Customer Satisfaction and Account Planning

Standardizing customer information on the D&B D-U-N-S number gives you a means for house-holding your customer data and eliminating duplicate customer records. This increases your ability to manage existing customer relationships because all opportunities for a customer are linked to the same customer record.

Add D&B's corporate family linkage, and you have the ability to manage and plan for customers at a local and global level. For example, you may want to see a roll up of all opportunities and potential revenue for all companies and locations related to Coca-Cola worldwide.


 Applications Administration Guide
 Published: 09 September 2004