Growing your business takes hard work, the right people, and the right ideas. Data and analytics are a driving force that improve a business’ ability to make effective decisions, ultimately giving it a competitive advantage within its industry. David Savlowitz is the CEO/Founder of Competitive Analytics headquartered in Costa Mesa, California USA. Competitive Analytics collaborates with its clients to analyze their internal data while correlating the results with external data to provide insightful demand forecasts, optimized pricing, and business intelligence solutions that companies can use to make informed decisions for future success. They also develop and design both desktop and mobile dashboards so their clients can visualize and interact with the information they need, whenever and wherever they need to access it. In addition to these services, they also provide strategic and tactical consulting to ensure their clients not only get answers to their questions, but also understand how to practically apply the results to improve their business.
Marketcircle: Who are your typical clients?
David Savlowitz: Our clients span from Fortune 100 companies to SMBs, to anything and everything in between. We have worked with a cross-section of industries, including companies such as Boeing, Standard Pacific Homes, Bank of America, NES Rentals, First American, City of Anaheim, City of Riverside, and City of Santa Ana, just to name a few.
Marketcircle: What do you enjoy most about what you do?
David: The best part of what we do is presenting our analytical results and watching the client’s reaction. They are always surprised and sometimes awestruck to see their data presented in a way they have never seen before . . . and showing so clearly how they can improve their bottom line. The next best part is, instead of typically hiring someone and waiting days, weeks or months for answers, the business intelligence solutions we provide empower clients to see answers to their questions in seconds. Clients are always impressed with the results because they are able to visualize their data. It’s surprising, but companies typically only use 5% of the value in their internal data. Then, there is external data – all the market drivers, economic indicators, and competitive data that impact and effect their business. We provide that analytical bridge, or overlay, between a company’s internal data and KPI’s with external drivers. This helps them answer their difficult questions, for example, “How does employment growth effect client’s sales?” or “How do demographic trends impact profits?”
Marketcircle: What are the challenges that you face?
David: Our greatest challenge is trying to land new clients that are completely cold (people I don’t know). Most of our business over the last 14 years has been through word of mouth and referrals. Because we just started marketing, the biggest challenge is determining how to effectively market to people that don’t know us and quickly and simply explain the complexity of what we do. Another challenge from the operations point of view is that while CEOs, CFOs and the rest of the C-Suite love us, the IT personnel and internal analysts can feel threatened by us, which can make the process difficult.
Marketcircle: When did you notice a need for Daylite in your business?
David:We knew we needed Daylite when it came to organizing contacts. We looked at over 50 CRMs. We had tried Daylite twice before, once a few years ago, and tried it again about a year ago. James Spencer helped us out a lot during this time. We just upgraded to Daylite 4 and we were disappointed with it at first because of some crashing issues. We then tried almost every other CRM available. We tried SalesForce, Podio, and Teambox to name a few but none of them felt right. We tried Daylite again in January of last year and noticed that Marketicircle did an amazing job fixing the bugs that caused us problems before. We tried it and absolutely love it! We’re also using Daylite in conjunction with analytics. We download data in a CSV file and uploaded it to our analytical dashboard to better understand our sales pipeline. Thus, we analyze our CRM data the way we analyze our clients’ data! We can download and create 3D scatter plots and look at our lead generations and leads in a comprehensive deep analytical way.
Marketcircle: How does Daylite help with your workflow?
David: With Daylite we can add all our clients and lead communication and store it through Daylite Mail Assistant. We’re also using Daylite for task management. The previous task management system I was using was hodgepodge of OmniFocus, Excel, and Google Docs and it wasn’t doing nearly the amount of heavy lifting that Daylite does. With Daylite I can link a task to a project, an opportunity, and the contact. I love that with Daylite you’re not beholden to the Web or Wifi speeds because it’s a native app. In addition, it’s completely customizable.
Marketcircle: What are some of your favourite features?
David: It’s tremendous that you can link everything so all your data is connected. One thing that saves me and our team a lot of time is that we can click on a contact’s phone number and it will take me right to Skype. I really love the contextual menu and I like the fact that there are categories and keywords. We use a BANT Qualifying system to rate each person. B for budget, A for authority, etc. so we can evaluate our leads. This system works really well with the categories and keywords in Daylite. I can easily filter, rank, and sort through over 10,000 contacts and know who I want to talk to. Another feature that’s helpful is the opportunity feature where I can view my opportunities in a list view with multiple sorts. I can combine the probability of a lead with the revenue to come up with expected value and I can filter, rank, and sort by any criteria I wish, which is really great.
Marketcircle: Would you recommend Daylite to others in your industry?
David: I already have. You can get your contacts and your leads in quickly and it doesn’t crash anymore.
Marketcircle: How has your experience been with support?
David: The support team is always very quick to respond which is really nice because it allows us to focus on getting our work done, rather than spending time worrying about troubleshooting our CRM.
