General

When it comes to "going out to sea" and "data," many people's first reaction is "customs data," as it covers information such as maritime procurement records and the contact information of buyers, making it a common channel for foreign traders to develop customers.

However, during the use process, we found that customs data actually has certain limitations, such as weak contact data, high information depreciation rate, and incomplete categories. How to solve the problem of difficult contact information for overseas procurement decision-makers and assist foreign trade professionals in efficiently developing overseas customers? This article will explore.

1、 The Pit Treaded by Customs Data

The common problems with customs data mainly include the following four aspects:

1. Lack of accurate contact information for key decision-makers

With the continuous intensification of global trade competition, having only one public contact information is no longer sufficient to meet the demand for B2B foreign trade going overseas. The ToB procurement decision-maker is crucial, and developing customers usually requires contacting the corresponding business departments, even the senior management of the enterprise. However, customs data often provides * * public email * * or landline phone numbers with prefixes such as information, service, and sales, making it difficult to accurately reach the needs of customer decision-makers.

2. The timeliness and accuracy of the provided trade data are weak

Customs data needs to be integrated and collected from countries that disclose customs information. The stored data is historical transaction data, which cannot be updated in real time. The depreciation rate of information is relatively high, and the accuracy of data is inevitably affected.

3. Not all countries and product categories have customs data

Out of over 200 countries and regions worldwide, only over 30 countries have publicly disclosed customs data. At the same time, customs data mainly includes sea freight information and does not include air freight information. Common bulk goods such as LED and electronic devices can be found from customs data with relevant purchasers, but lighter and higher value goods such as chips and electronic atomizers mostly choose air freight channels, and relevant information cannot be found in customs data.

4. There is a large amount of invalid data such as freight and logistics companies

Due to financial/tax considerations, many companies choose affiliated companies for customs clearance, or declare in the name of freight forwarders, logistics, customs agents, and other companies. This type of situation often occurs during sea freight consolidation transportation, resulting in some buyers in customs data not being real purchasers.

It is difficult to directly obtain accurate customer contact information through customs data, and foreign trade sales personnel usually need to spend a lot of extra effort on expanding the contact information of target companies throughout the network.

2、 Low efficiency of self expansion contacts in foreign trade sales

At present, there are two commonly used methods for manually expanding contact data in foreign trade sales: Google and LinkedIn.

Google search 

Search for business keywords in the target industry on Google, find the corresponding company's official website, and view the contact information left on the official website. However, it is difficult to directly indicate the contact information of the decision-maker on the official customer website, which indirectly prolongs the customer development cycle for our sales and increases the difficulty of ordering.

LinkedIn Expansion

Search for contacts of target companies through dimensions such as country, industry, department, and job level in LinkedIn, and send on-site messages to reach customers through methods such as adding friends and upgrading Sales Navigator solutions.

However, due to usage habits, the processing rate of unfamiliar information on LinkedIn is relatively weaker than that of email, and the threshold for using internal messages for promotion is relatively low. Customers' accounts will accumulate a large amount of unprocessed unfamiliar information, which may result in a pass rate of less than 5% for our friend's application or response rate to internal messages. Moreover, adding friends too frequently may be restricted or even banned, and there may also be restrictions on the number of messages sent on the site.

In addition, some foreign trade sales have attempted to use data crawler tools for self collection of webpage information. But contact data is different from customs data, with extremely scattered sources, making it difficult to obtain all information through a single channel.

There are over a hundred common sources of contact data:

● Customer official website

● Social media

● Google Search

Recruitment website

Enterprise Yellow Pages

● Exhibition Handbook

The energy and cost of collecting data from thousands of online domain names by foreign trade sales personnel themselves is indeed high. And I found it in a timely manner, and I also face three key indicators related to efficiency:

Find Rate: The probability of finding the target contact's phone or email contact information through a global search.

Fulfillment rate: The probability that the contact information found is complete, including company, position, business scope, and other complete information.

Accuracy: After finding relatively complete data, there is no probability that the data will fail due to customer resignation

If there is a demand, there will be a market. Although foreign trade sales have low efficiency in manually searching for customer data, through mature contact database service providers and according to the target customer profile required by the enterprise, contact data can be purchased at a low cost. This is currently a relatively efficient way to obtain customers. A valuable enterprise contact data must at least include key fields such as the corresponding contact person's name, company, function, job level, phone or email (work email/personal email), in order to help us effectively judge customer value and achieve accurate communication. The information provided by customs data on procurement companies, categories, prices, time, frequency, and other factors is more to help us select a reference list of companies that meet the target profile. By combining with the enterprise contact database, we can quickly match and obtain target enterprise decision-maker data, assisting the market and sales team in accurately developing target customers.

Customs data and enterprise contact database each have advantages and can be used together for higher efficiency. In order to help everyone have a clearer understanding, we will compare six dimensions: data type, data content, data source, data update, contact data, and application scenario:

If the industry does not have customs data as a reference, a list of target enterprises can also be found and obtained through keyword filtering in the enterprise contact database.

Firstly, clarify the target customer profile, such as summarizing the characteristics of existing customers, potential customers, and partners from dimensions such as country, industry, company, department, job level, business keywords, and distributors. Through the enterprise contact database, screen and obtain enterprise contact information based on target profiles, and continuously reach and transform target customers through various forms such as development letters, product manuals, event invitations, and case sharing.

By utilizing a reasonable and efficient data acquisition path, combined with the complementary advantages of different types of data, we can help B2B overseas enterprises transform passive inquiries into proactive ones, achieving impressive performance growth.