x
ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA is the official trade promotion organisation of Austria. It has a strong global presence, with over 100 offices in over 70 countries. It offers a range of services to support the growth of Austrian businesses, both domestically and internationally, including intelligence gathering and business development assistance. ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA aims to increase international opportunities for Austrian businesses by promoting their products and services worldwide, facilitating connections between Austrian companies and businesses in other countries. It also plays a key role in promoting Austria as a good place to invest.
Researching and piecing together company information for business matching is tedious and time consuming. This was the obstacle that Isaac Loo faced as the Trade Market Officer at Advantage Austria. Previously, he would spend half his time googling product and industry keywords to discover potential partners for his Austrian clients looking to enter the Singapore market. The process involved clicking into the individual company websites surfaced by Google search results and manually extracting information such as contact details and business description to compile reports for his clients. The rest of his time would be spent learning about companies and shortlisting suitable partners. To add a layer of complexity, Advantage Austria had a diverse clientele from various industries – their ideal business partners ranged from plastic manufacturers to international schools.
As a generalist, Isaac knew he needed to shorten the hours spent on research to improve productivity so he explored various company intelligence platforms. To his dismay, most of them focused on North American and European markets. Moreover, sales support was poor presumably due to time zone differences, so Isaac did not even get a response after submitting sales inquiries to a few of the vendors. On the other hand, those that had local data coverage were often traditional business directories that were either limited in capabilities or outdated in the information provided, hardly options that Isaac could rely on to competently carry out his duty. Everything changed when he stumbled upon The Grid, drawn by The Grid’s hyperlocalization value proposition. “Considering my market focus, The Grid’s data depth immediately stood out,” Isaac shared. The Grid’s filter is one of the features used the most by Isaac as it allows him to discover companies quickly and generate comprehensive lists of relevant targets for his clients based on different criteria, thereby reducing overall search costs. He would often use the keyword function to help him search for companies that carried specific products and profiles. Features like The Grid’s recommendations of lookalike companies and readily available contact information were an added bonus. He could build a shortlist efficiently and engage the prospects instantly. To top it off, he had strong assurance that the data quality was solid. “I’ve peace of mind that the companies in The Grid are legitimate as registry data is one of the main data sources”.
With The Grid, Isaac experienced the results immediately, noting an 8x improvement in productivity. This is also helped by The Grid’s responsive customer support. Isaac is able to receive support quickly from The Grid’s customer success representatives whenever he needs further assistance. Tasks that previously took days were reduced to a few simple hours. This freed Isaac up to produce reports of higher quality for his clients, delivering much more refined advice and recommendations.
“In the past, we relied on personal contacts or previous sponsors, but now we are starting to get new sponsors from various industries including hospitality, fashion, entertainment and consumer electronics that we have never worked with before ... because of The Grid’s ability to find key stakeholders in human resources and marketing departments.”
“In the past, it would take us an entire month to completely piece together the info on inbound leads for one event. It has now been shortened to 2 days thanks to The Grid... What would have taken 5-10 minutes per company now only takes a matter of seconds.”
“Compared to using other tools or combing through the internet, The Grid saves us so much time in terms of generating a target list of prospects that fit our ideal customer profile and getting contact details, so that my team can spend more time on sales outreach.”