Atoka is a SaaS B2B lead generation service on the Italian market that provides a single point of access to very detailed, organized, summarized, up-to-date company information from open and non-open, official (e.g., national company registers) and unofficial (e.g., the website of a company) sources. Atoka+ is a new product extending the existing solution and widening its potential customer base by servicing new jurisdictions through company and company-related information in the United Kingdom and Norway.Targeted customers are mostly sales representatives and marketing managers.
Atoka is a lead generation service that provides a powerful search interface to retrieve company information. Through this interface, users define highly detailed queries that retrieve companies fitting certain profiles. To support the definition of these rich queries, Atoka takes company information from national registers and enriches company profiles integrating information from additional official and non-official sources. To tackle the complexity in making sense of increasing amounts of information that come with more jurisdictions and richer company information, we built a layer of interpretation on top of all the information gathered. This layer of interpretation is realized through indicators that summarize the performance of a company and provide ways to compare it against others.
SMEs, Banks, Large Corporations, Local Government Bodies
Lead Generation can be a painstaking, slow, and expensive process. Finding and cultivating multiple lead sources require the ability to build accurate profiles that describe what a company is about and where it is heading.
Building these profiles and keeping them up-to-date means acquiring, organizing and linking disparate sources of information that continuously change.
The B2B Lead Generation services sector has seen steady growth in recent years. The availability of vasts amounts of company data from official and unofficial sources enables the implementation of new services that help businesses retrieve, understand and filter the information that they need. Atoka is built to be a key tool for effective strategies that require not only the availability and continuous update of company data but also the ability to interpret this data and extract the insights needed.
Atoka integrates several information sources for the Italian market, covering information about company certifications (e.g., ISO 14001 regarding environmental management, prEN 9100 for the aerospace industry, etc.), territorial indicators that describe the surroundings of company sites in aspects such as the quality of adjacent buildings and socio-economic characteristics of the population, foreign markets in which the company operates, job positions, public funding received by the company, owned real-estate, shareholders and ownership of other companies.
As part of our continuous work to bring additional information sources, we recently released a customer data integration pipeline. This tool minimizes the effort required to use information provided by our customers for highly specialized lead generation tasks. It is operated by defining collections of extra data, linked to individual company instances, and filters that work on this extra data for searching and faceting, all in the same way as the other filters offered by Atoka. Moreover, the pipeline also makes this extra data available through Atoka’s APIs, enabling integration back into existing tools and processes of the customer.
To facilitate interpretation of the information contained in the knowledge base, new indicators are available that describe the performance of the company and other phenomena associated with it. The Seasonal Indicator predicts the company's reliance on seasonal workers based on historical data about the number of employees. The Foreign Market Score considers data about companies selling abroad and/or looking for foreign business to build profiles that predict the likelihood that other companies will do the same. The Innovation Score ranks company profiles regarding the presence of salient characteristics typical of Italian start-ups. Finally, the Web Centrality score indicates how connected the webpage of a company is to other webpages on the corporate web.
All the work done to enable new jurisdictions, to integrate additional sources and to provide interpretation of the information has broadened the appeal of Atoka. This is especially the case for prospects that operate in the new jurisdictions or that need the information available in the new sources to perform highly specialized lead generation activities.
In order to paint an up-to-date picture of a company, Atoka integrates official information that is usually found in sources that are structured and easy to process and unofficial information that often comes as natural language text and is not easily understandable by computers. To process this unofficial information, we use natural language processing tools. These tools extract meaning from the unstructured text to paint the more dynamic aspects of the life of a company.
We use this automated approach to process company websites and extract keywords that produce a richer description of what the company is about than what is usually obtained from just resorting to the economic activity classification declared by the company at registration time.
Additionally, we follow a similar approach to analyse business news annotating company mentions within the articles. In this way, we can quickly build company-specific news streams so our users can check what is being said about the companies they are interested in.
We maintain a database of 6 million companies in Italy alone. For each company we hold registration information (e.g., legal name, legal form, economic activity class), annual balance sheets, contact lists, website summaries, physical company sites, web technologies in use, data about social media engagement and pointers to news articles mentioning the company and things related to the company. On top of that, we provide indicators that analyse company stats to answer questions such as how connected a company is to others, how prone they are to do business outside their home country or how innovative a company is.
Atoka provides 30+ filters that operate on all the data that we gather. Through the use of these filters, our users can get as specific as they need.
These are examples of the queries that can be made using Atoka:
- By name and registry number, in order to know more about specific companies
- By company sector, using official information and keywords retrieved from company websites
- By contact types, to quickly understand the role of the people you want to talk to
- By financials, to target SMEs or big companies
- By location, so you understand which companies have a presence on a certain area