The Unexpected Strategy That Built Trust and Transformed Client Targeting for a Business Analyst

Yeah, absolutely. And so, um, one of the projects I worked on, you know, at, at Cambervie when I first started, we are a B2B advisory company on corporate governance, and, um, I was brought in to essentially help make data-driven decisions and support, you know, multiple different teams cross-functioning from our finance team to our sales team, and when I was brought in, the focus was really on the sales side to, to try to hone in as many kind of public clients as we can. And so, um, One of the projects that I got, you know, it's very difficult to get time with, with the CEO or the president as they're traveling, so, It was a half an hour call that I had on the phone with him, and he pretty much just laid out like, hey, I need help trying to get high probability clients to our sales team. And we're having a hard time, you know, when we, we set up kind of news notifications, and by the time the news notifications come in and we try to target these companies, it's already too late. They already have their advisors, and so, find a way for me to um target some of these high probability clients and um. Put them in front of our team before they kind of make the news. And, and even if they don't make the news, it's at least good that we can, based on, you know, what the numbers you provided, we can at least have some conversations with them. So, um, it was very, one, it was very difficult for me because I did not have any corporate governance experience. Um, the first time I was kind of doing, uh, Kind of a target market marketing target, uh, exercise such as this. So, kind of just started high level, um, kind of built up like a structured kind of case here, uh, organized my thoughts into being like, all right, what does, what does the market look like? Um, you know, so our market was essentially the, all the companies in the S&P 500, and how do we kind of go about narrowing that down. So, I looked at, kind of gathered a bunch of data first, gathered the financial data, gathered the corporate governance data, gathered some of our sales force data companies we've been in touch with before. Um, and then I didn't, once I had all of that in place, kind of stitched it all together in an Excel doc, it was a matter of finding out, OK, how do we kind of narrow this down? What factors really drive, um, hedge fund activism, which, which is what we were targeting here, which companies are more susceptible to hedge funds coming in and, um, Doing an activism, um, on the company. And so, um, I worked, this is where, like, you know, I had to go around and, and, and find people on our team who had previous hedge fund activist experiences, talking to people externally, doing online research to try to figure out, hey, what, what are kind of like the main KPIs here. Um, so, there were a couple people on our team who, who had some previous experience in hedge fund activist firms. They introduced me to some other folks that I also talked to externally. Um, and was able to kind of look at a bunch of different variables and narrow that down using financial data, um, looked at corporate governance data to see, hey, have hedge funds had any exposure in certain companies before. And lastly, um, was also able to use Salesforce data to see, hey, like, do we have, have we been in touch with these people previously, and what have we sold to them previously, and who was in contact with them. So, I was able to build a model where, you know, built it in Tableau that the data was coming in on a daily basis and updating and it would essentially give a list of companies um that were we considered high probability clients, um, that our sales teams could go and at least build relationships with. So, over a span of two years, um, you know, we had talks with over 60, 70 companies, but we were able to hire 3 of them, which was, which was something I was very proud of. But The one thing that I went away from the quantitative and really went to the qualitative side is the really go to market strategy is once we had the list of companies, it's like how do we really reach out to them if we've never had contact with them before. So you can't really like cold email, can't really make phone calls. So, one thing I did look at implementing. And, and we did, my, my team and I implemented with, with a tool called Boora where we were able to take a list of everyone's LinkedIn contacts, their Outlook contacts, and also we inputted our client contacts in there. And what Boarda really did was, you know, in corporate governance, we really work with the C-suite, uh, team at, at public companies, so they were able to take a look at all the board members that are client teams. And also make kind of like a web connection. It's like a LinkedIn for board members and you were able to see like, hey, this person knows. Um, know somebody on the PNG board or this guy also sits on the PNG board, so we were able to get a lot of different, um, second degree connections there, um, that was able to help do the introduction. So, not just going on the quantitative side where we kind of built a model to get the companies, but really driving the go to market strategy as well on how to make that initial first contact.

Yeah, I think, I think the biggest challenge for me was, you know, it was the first project that I had worked on when I first started, and It was me flying with not much direction. And so, me going to different sales team members and um trying to convince them that this is, this is a project that, that, you know, we're taking on internally and trying to, trying to, you know, push through for them, um, and kind of gathering all this information from them that I didn't even necessarily know whether they had or not. And so it was more so going to different people and building the trust from different people because we not only pulled in Data from the sales team, or, or like the financial data online, but we also, I had also had to work with the financial team to, to bring in some of kind of the revenue data as well that we've had in the past and if we had sold that client before on certain services. So, um, I think the challenge for me was really, um, not having much time spent with some of these senior folks and being able to kind of build that relationship over time, um, was, I would say the biggest challenge.

That's a good question. I'm, I'm not 100 100% sure. It was, it was a time when I started first initially. It was, it was the first time, um, that it, it was a new employee. I, I don't think that initial trust and was there yet. Um, I think some, some people were willing to take the risk and, and kind of dive in deep with me and, and help me out, but others weren't, and they probably had different priorities. So, I had to kind of, over time, Show them, you know, not only just my skills, but also the fact that they can trust me, um. With clients or or or doing work for them or providing them details that can kind of get them off the launching pad initially and and um get, get them good information towards the client. So it took some time to slowly, it didn't always necessarily start off with this project, but I had to do a lot of other things on the side that kind of built that trust over time.