Soon after the pandemic began, Dun & Bradstreet developed a COVID-19 index which allowed companies to assess the pandemic risk to their loan portfolio, suppliers, and customer base. The firm moved to further enable analysis by implementing the scores within their D&B Hoovers sales and marketing intelligence platform.
“The COVID-19 Impact Index provides insight into how the Coronavirus pandemic is impacting a company’s location, industry, and financial strength,” wrote VP of Product Management McWade. “This data can help you actively monitor the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on accounts and prospects and refine targeting strategies accordingly.”
“The Index assesses impacts to a business based on the proximity of corporate locations to the pandemic, as well as the level of disruption to the company’s network due to site suppliers and business customers impacted by the pandemic. Each week, the company and network situation are assessed, and a score ranging from highest to low is assigned to five key impact areas to provide visibility into the level of disruption that may be impacting the account.”
D&B VP of Product Management Phil McWade
The new index is displayed in the Company Summary with simple Green / Yellow / Red indexing. The five variables have also been added to the Advanced Insights section of Search & Build a List.
The COVID-19 Impact Index Variables are
- Financial Impact – Leverages Dun & Bradstreet’s trade credit and risk data to understand financial health by assessing a company’s ability to meet payment obligations, as well as the probability of declaring bankruptcy, experiencing significant financial distress, engaging in M&A activity, and other high-risk activities.
- Location Impact – Reviews business site and corporate family locations subject to lockdown, stay-at-home, and shelter-in-place orders and weighs this information by the number of confirmed cases and growth in cases by location. Country, state, county, and city-level location restrictions are assessed. Local hospitalization rates are also factored into the variables.
- Industry Impact – Looks at industry impact signals to understand industry-associated risk by identifying essential businesses, which can operate remotely, require the physical presence of customers, and need employees to be at a central location.
- Overall Impact without Network Effects – Combines the financial, location, and industry impact indicators to determine the overall risk of the business.
- Overall Impacts with Network Effects – Reviews business connections with other organizations, such as customers, suppliers, or other third parties, to understand impacts on the company’s network. This score provides the most comprehensive view of the current situation by adding network impacts to the company’s financial, location, and industry elements.
In Build a List, sales reps can filter for companies that are less impacted by COVID-19. For territory reps located in hotspots, the location filter should be removed so they can identify companies that are better sheltered from the pandemic. For example, both Carnival Cruises and Univision are headquartered in Miami, but Carnival would be a weak prospect due to COVID (all five indicators are highest) while Univision would be a good target (Location is highest, but the remaining variables are low). Conversely, verticalized reps that sell into one or a few industries would omit the industry risk variable but include the location variable. This strategy would identify firms that are otherwise low risk.
Lists can be saved as SmartLists of low-risk prospects that are updated weekly.
COVID-19 Index variables should not be employed as ABM variables for determining which companies to target strategically. The variables are ephemeral and are unlikely to align with strategic fit. However, they provide a valuable overlay to ABM lists for focusing on companies that are better sheltered from the economic and operational impacts of the pandemic. They also provide a warning flag to Customer Success Managers and Account Executives around which firms may be looking to downgrade or churn, allowing sales to plan for one-time discounts, additional services, or alternative financing terms.
Variables are view-only in the desktop and CRM editions, but not downloadable to the desktop or synced with CRMs.
The index variables are global.
Other recent enhancements to D&B Hoovers were discussed yesterday.