The CAS Software company dossier – decision support at a glance

When you receive a new lead, consider a new supplier, or want to learn more about potential partners. What is important data that you are interested in or use for evaluation? E.g. legal form, date of incorporation, headquarters or revenue size or number of employees? What are the names of the members of the management? Business development or creditworthiness? Are there any branches or subsidiaries?

CAS genesisWorld and SmartWe users can find all of this at a glance in the company dossier – which is part of a whole series of so-called Augmented Intelligence Assistants (AIA), as CAS Software itself calls the integrated product category and is presenting for the first time.

We have taken a closer look at the company dossier and this is the focus today:

The Enterprise Dossier has been on the market in conjunction with CAS genesisWorld since November 2020. As an app, the feature has been available in the SmartWe Store since July 2021. This provides users with comprehensive company information. Whether marketing, sales, purchasing or even management – everyone receives optimal support to make significantly better and faster decisions.

What problem is solved with the company dossier?

The users of the company dossier get an important added value by collecting external information and company data of (potential) customers, partners and suppliers from various sources, summarizing them clearly and presenting them.

A clear presentation in the form of a live dossier

The concrete usage offer includes the following information – an overview:

• Data on companies such as year of foundation, size class employees, turnover class, share capital, EBID number, VAT ID, commercial register number, local court.
• A short profile of the respective company
• Information on the company network or group of companies, branches, branch structure
• Shareholder structure
• Members of the management
• Industries according to WZ 2008 industry classification from the Federal Statistical Office
• Address & contact, e-mail, fax, website
• Annual financial statements from the register portal and for an additional fee: other value-added services from the Unternehmensverzeichnis.org integrated into the CRM such as Schufa information
• Social media links (company profiles)

What are the advantages for the user?

The user no longer has to research himself in the various sources such as the Bundesanzeiger (Federal Gazette), the Handelsregisterportal (Commercial Register Portal) and other sources in order to obtain the company information. He gets everything that is currently publicly available integrated at a glance, directly in the respective CRM solution.

What’s special about this is that the user receives all of this in an interactive display that graphically visualizes the company network and shareholder structure, for example.

For which user group does the feature offer advantages?

In principle, for all companies that want to find out more about other companies. This is particularly interesting for B2B companies. But company data about suppliers and partners can also serve as a decision-making aid for B2C companies.

Whether in the area of customer relationship management (CRM) or supply chain management (SCM), the company dossier offers particular added value in many business areas. For example:

• Sales (field and office sales)
• Management
• Purchasing
• Marketing
• Customer service, order taking

What are typical use cases for the application of the enterprise dossier?

Today we present three use cases. In practice, of course, there are many more possible uses.

Use Case 1 from the sales perspective: Qualified lead processing

With the company dossier, sales staff can display aggregated information on potential leads. This promotes fast and qualified lead processing.

To do this, the CAS software module uses selected information about the leads, such as

• Company information (location, year of foundation, annual turnover, number of employees, etc.), short profile
• In which industry or industries does the company operate? Based on WZ 2008 classification
• Links to social media channels

Advantage 1: Lots of info from one source, instead of tedious search. Interconnections and information, who you already know and who you don’t know yet, become visible. The view of leads and customers becomes much better, more transparent.

Advantage 2: The lead score is more precise and differentiated, a better prioritization or time-budget allocation is the logical consequence.

Advantage 3: Less gut feeling, but more reliable facts.

Use Case 2 from the CEO’s point of view: Transparency about the liquidity of new business partners

With the new feature of CAS software, managing directors gain transparency about the liquidity of companies. This provides a decision-making aid as to whether to do business with the companies in question. To do this, the company dossier provides information about the company in question, such as

• How do the balance sheet data of the last years look like?
• Information on liabilities (assets) and assets (liabilities)
• Key figures
• Is the company sufficiently liquid?
• Can I do business with this company? Is it possible to accept the large order “on account” or what should the payment terms be?

Here, too, the advantage: lots of information from a single source, instead of a lengthy search.

Use Case 3 from the point of view of sales or management: shareholder structures at a glance

Especially in key account management or as a venture capitalist (VC), the information from the company dossier is particularly important. Only in this way can the entire potential be assessed/estimated.

• What do the shareholder structure and company linkages look like?
• What does this mean for my business development?
• Which influencers are there?
• Who plays which role in the decision-making body (buying center)?

Advantage: All relevant information is clearly displayed. As a user, you see not only current relationships, but also former relationships.

Which data sources are used?

The data comes from publicly accessible directories, e.g. from the commercial register and from the companies’ websites. We cooperate with various partners and new sources are added all the time.

Price and offer model – a bargain for all CAS users

The new feature is available to all companies that use the CRM solution CAS genesisWorld or the cloud-based CRM solution SmartWe. The price and offer model is as follows:

5 queries per month free of charge “as a freemium package” included in admin license costs.
Otherwise 10 Euro per month for 1,000 queries / calls per user as flat rate (introductory price)

Intermediate conclusion: If you imagine how high the effort and the individual costs of a trade register query are, this is a very good price. Conclusion: Extremely favorable!

Interface / Look&Feel / Usability

The interface corresponds to the SmartDesign technology of CAS software, which ensures a uniform look & feel of the company dossier on all relevant end devices. The structure is clear and a clear line is recognizable. Relationships and interconnections can be displayed and hidden interactively.

The drill-up/drill-down functions are exciting to use. An interactive graph that can be zoomed in and out helps maintain clarity and “zoom in” on relationships. Contacts that are already stored in CRM are visually highlighted in the graph.

The team at CAS Software has put a lot of thought into how to prepare this much information.

Summary

Conclusion

For users of CAS genesisWorld and SmartWe, the company dossier with the detailed company info offers enormous added value, great time savings and all this for a very reasonable price.

It also helps to increase data quality when company information is available uniformly and quickly directly in the CRM system.

The three use cases described above alone show how versatile this module is. And more are added every month. This is important know-how for the entire company!

Outlook: What can users of the company dossier look forward to in the future?

We are planning to expand the focus from German companies to European companies, especially Austria and Switzerland at the beginning.

In addition, further updates are to come in the course of 2021. Here, users can already prepare themselves for exciting innovations:

• Expansion of the database to include additional data suppliers (especially in the non-trade register area).
• Further filter options
• Optimization of the user experience
• Optimized display of evaluations and trends such as sales, employee and earnings development
• Display of “company news

Further information about CAS

• https://www.cas.de/de/start.html
• All parts of the interview with Martin Hubschneider, CEO of CAS Software AG about the company, genesisWorld, SmartWe, company dossier and a lot of CRM news.
• Quotations created as if by magic – CAS Merlin – the product, service and contract configurator

 

Note: This is a machine translation. It is neither 100% complete nor 100% correct. We can therefore not guarantee the result.