Last spring, we released Vainu Custom Industries, an AI model that identifies unique company industries to help facilitate relevant B2B segmentation and targeting. With Custom Industries, sales and marketing teams have created precise and meaningful target segments, which has allowed them to personalize their approach at scale. Since then, we've been hard at work finding ways to make this feature even better, and today we can finally unveil (one of) the fruits of our labor—Custom Industry Confidence Scores. Read on to learn more about it!
The benefits of Custom Industries for sales and marketing teams are straightforward: Simplified lead and prospect qualification and increased conversions and hit rates through more personalized targeting. However, the benefits can become more obscure when other corporate functions, such as analytics, finance, and research teams, tap into this kind of company data, i.e., Custom Industries.
You don't need to have spent years in academia to understand the importance of data quality and validity in research and analysis. But, just in case you’re on the fence, data quality and validity are essential in research and analysis. In fact, so important that we chose to develop the Custom Industry Confidence Scores, which provide organizations with accurate and valid industry classifications to base their analyses and research on.
Data quality and validity are essential in research and analysis. In fact, so important that we chose to develop the Custom Industry Confidence Scores, which provide organizations accurate and valid industry classifications to base their analyses and/or research on.
How Custom Industry Confidence Scores work
Now you can find four (4) new data fields in the Vainu API:
- value = Custom Industry Value, for example FinTech or GreenTech.
- confidence_score = a decimal between 0.0 and 1.0. The higher the score, the higher the confidence. For example, if you want to find FinTech companies, increasing the confidence score threshold will improve your precision but lower your recall. You'll get more accurate results (less false predictions) but a lower percentage of all correct results (recall).
- confidence_thresholds = this is the confidence score threshold where recall is 50 % in our training data set. If you include all companies with confidence scores higher than this threshold, you will get 50 % of all the relevant companies.
- confidence_class = High or Low. Since many of our users don't bother studying all the details of precision and recall, this is an easy way to decide whether you want to include only the predictions with high confidence or include the ones where our model is less confident.
Use cases for Customer Industry Confidence Scores
1. Prospecting
Custom Industries is the perfect solution if it's hard for you to find your ideal customers using standard industry classifications. It can be used to find companies operating in specific segments, such as Gaming, FinTech, Data Warehousing, Virtual Reality, and 800+ other clearly defined segments.
2. Prioritization
Whether a company belongs to a particular segment, e.g., FinTech, isn't necessarily a binary and straightforward question. Some companies can clearly be identified as FinTech companies, while others have only a few characteristics indicating that industry. This is where our confidence scores come in handy; you can easily sort your results based on the strength of the prediction by using our confidence scores.
3. Segmentation
Custom Industries and confidence scores allow you to build the micro-segments you've always dreamed of. For example, you can now target companies that are clearly SaaS companies and then have some characteristics of Customer Service, Customer Engagement, or User Experience. Just select Custom Industry SaaS with a high confidence score and use lower confidence scores for Customer Service, Customer Engagement, and User Experience.
4. Analysis
Whether you worked in sales/revenue operations or the public sector, you can easily analyze a list of companies more granularly and in greater detail.The event industry has been in turmoil since the beginning of Covid. The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (Elinkeinoelmän tutkimuslaitos, ETLA) published a study about "The Role of the Event Industry in the Finnish Economy." The study focuses on analyzing the size and role of the Finnish event industry and the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis on companies operating in the event industry.
But how could this be measured? Is there an industry category for the event industry? Certainly not in official industry classifications. So, an opportunity presented itself for us at Vainu to help solve this problem.
In this blog post, you can read more about how organizations like Tesi and Sniffie–and we at Vainu ourselves–are using Custom Industries to create hyper-targeted micro-segments for sales, marketing, and research purposes.
Availability
Custom Industry values and the new confidence scores are available through Vainu's API or a data file (CSV, JSON).
Not using Vainu's API? Custom Industries are also available for filtering your target accounts directly on the Vainu platform. Create and export (Excel, CSV) your target lists, including Custom Industries, with just a few clicks of a button!
Want a small taste of what Vainu Custom Industries can do for you? Then you should consider downloading a list of 100 Nordic companies from one of our precise VCI segments—it's free! All you have to do is click here. Alternatively, request a demo or chat with us to discover how Vainu Custom Industries can help fix B2B segmentation for you.
