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Dialogic Communications Corporation Targets 14 Vertical Markets with BusinessMAP PRODatabase Mapping Sharpens Direct Marketing Efforts
A leader in interactive call processing solutions, DCC provides software and services to more than 800 customer sites worldwide. Among its vertical markets are aviation, chemical, emergency services such as police and firefighting, financial services, medical, military, and telecommunications. DCC products include The Communicator!, a powerful, Windows NT-based on-site emergency notification system, and Scenario, which is aimed primarily at the health care industry to replace outdated and unreliable manual phone call trees. To locate prospects in an unusually complex market, DCC acquired a third party Business database in early 1998. Although it contained important new Business information, the database did not permit DCC to compare current clients and potential customers on a geographic basis because it had no mapping capability. "This kind of comparison is helpful to eliminate duplicate mailings," said Dave Krikac, DCC's vice president of marketing. Unnecessary mailings result in higher costs because DCC must pay a license fee for each name from the list in every mailing. For example, the company paid $3,500 (U.S.) for a one-time direct campaign to 7,000 police and fire departments. The pointless expense of mailing twice to the same prospect, or even once to a Business not interested in DCC's products, gave the company a strong incentive to keep its lists for mailings and telemarketing sharply focused. To do this, DCC needed database mapping capability, which it found in Esri's BusinessMAP PRO Version 2.0 with the optional Business Tracker extension. Business Tracker provides a list of 11 million U.S. Businesses sorted by their primary federal government SIC codes.
"It's very powerful to see these two maps together on one page," Krikac said. "Visually, I could tell immediately where we were not hitting our potential customers. You just can't get that realization without visually mapping your list. "Airports are just one example," he continued. "One glance at a map of airports and it was obvious where we needed to target our next airport campaign." Mapping one or multiple databases gives companies an instant means to uncover entirely new locations for possible customers. "Mapping is a road to a new territory," noted independent database marketing consultant Geoffrey Hollander, president of Lake Oswego, Oregon, based Mail Pouch, which specializes in database warehousing of names for mailing and direct marketing purposes. "You do it to orient yourself on where you are, and then mapping shows you where you want to go." Krikac began to use BusinessMAP PRO Version 2.0 on a regular basis to develop maps of potential customers. He then exported the files of those Business names to a contact manager to form the basis of either a mailing or telemarketing effort. "I can execute my queries and customer profiles, map them geographically, and then present them to my vice president of sales," Krikac said. "This helps us focus our mailing and telemarketing campaigns precisely in those areas we most need to cover." According to Krikac, the major benefit to his company in database mapping is the near-instant ability to be more strategic and streamlined with the company's marketing efforts. "Before database mapping, we were shooting at a blank wall and drawing a circle around what we managed to hit after the fact," he explained. "With database mapping, we now can target prospects more precisely." Krikac also discovered other useful applications for database mapping. The pace of competition is so rapid within DCC's sales territories that the boundaries constantly had to be adjusted to compensate for changing conditions. Database mapping reduced the time needed for realignment from days or even weeks to minutes. "It saves hundreds of hours of my time," Krikac said. In addition, he uses BusinessMAP PRO Version 2.0 to develop maps of sales territories or prospects as part of presentations to show DCC's senior management. The bottom line for Krikac and DCC: database mapping saves money. It also makes time-consuming yet critical tasks quicker to complete, while offering better, much more easily understood results. BusinessMAP PRO Version 2.0 eliminated the need for a far more costly software purchase at the outset. Over the long term, it not only continues to save Krikac's time, it has eliminated the cost of hiring an in-house employee to handle mapping or outsourcing the mapping function. "It's so easy, even a vice president of marketing can use it," he said. For more information, contact Dave Krikac, Dialogic Communications Corporation (tel.: 615-790-2882). |
Cost-effective, precisely targeted Business-to-Business marketing is always a challenge for any company. This task is especially difficult for Esri Business partner Dialogic Communications Corporation (DCC), a Franklin, Tennessee, based software company that targets potential customers in more than 14 distinct vertical markets.
Using this database mapping software with the extension and in conjunction with the third party Business database, Krikac now could compare existing and potential customer profiles on a geographic basis. With just a few clicks of the mouse, he mapped his current client list in a certain territory. Then, using SIC codes as the basis for a match, he overlaid on the first map a second one showing Businesses that were similar to the previous list. He also found he was able to map prospects in a discrete vertical market within a given geographic area.