In a prior post I wrote about the importance of creating a territory plan. The idea is to come up with a list of prospects to call on based on researching your prior success and mapping that success in your territory. To read the article click HERE. Now that you have a list of prospects, and hopefully some existing accounts to work, it’s time to create some account plans. If you call on very small accounts and have a high churn rate, this is necessary for your success too. You just won’t have as much data to work with. The specific data that I’m talking about today is for publicly traded companies.
There is a goldmine of free information available that every seller can leverage. It’s online at www.sec.gov. I was taking advantage of this kind of information in my first year out of college well before the Internet. My job was to perform competitive analysis and I spent hours in the public library pulling company filings and creating metrics to help our organization compare itself to our competitors. No more driving to the library now. It’s all online.
Blog continued below
Would you spend $3.99 to get a big deal un-stuck? Seems like a silly question – who wouldn’t. Well, I have developed a killer email that gets deals unstuck and it works so well that I wrote a book about it. And, I have also included two other emails to help you as well. It’s a short book – 22 pages printed – and it will take you about ten minutes to read. The ideas in the book are simple – almost silly. But you’ll be pleasantly surprised if not shocked with the results.
The book is available at just about every electronic outlet, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Kobo. It’s also available for your iPad at the iTunes store.
No eReader? No problem! Click HERE to download and print the book in any format you want.
The challenge is that there are dozens of filings and some have more useful information than others. Here is a step-by-step process to find relevant information online:
Go to www.sec.gov
Under “Filings and Forms”, Click on “Search for Company Filings”.
On the next page, click on “Company or fund name, ticker symbol, CIK (Central Index Key), file number, state, country, or SIC (Standard Industrial Classification)
Pick a company to start your research. If you can't come up with one, try "ALL" for Allstate Insurance.
Once you enter the ticker symbol you will be presented with dozens of reports. Only a few of these are relevant for your research and are full of great information.
The first is the 10-Q. The 10-Q is the quarterly report that every public company must submit and it contains important financial and company direction information. Here you will find the most recent income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. You don’t need to have a CPA to understand if sales are down or profits are up. What you are looking for here are trends that indicate how the company is performing. There are also sections that explain the company performance in great detail, who their major customers are, what companies they have acquired, and other major developments that impact their overall performance. There is also some very sophisticated financial disclosure information that some sellers will find important while others won’t. Pick and choose the information that is relevant for your selling situation.
The next is the 10-K. This is the annual report, detailing the financial results for the year. This report contains much of the same information contained in the 10-Q but is based on annual figures where the 10-Q is based on quarterly figures. If you want the most recent information, use the 10-Q. The 10-K is typically more detailed since it covers an entire year.
An important part of the 10-K is how individual divisions within the organization are performing. This is particularly important for the very large companies that are a federation of separate operating organizations. You are likely to have much more success calling on an operating division than you are calling on the company headquarters. Pick the operating division that is more likely to purchase from you, and drill down on their performance. Are they growing? Have the acquired a competitor? What are their key business drivers? Most of this information can be found in the 10-K.
DEF 14A is the next filing to pay attention to. This is the filing with information on the executive team and the board of directors (BOD). This could be important to you for a couple of reasons. First, an executive from your organization may serve on the other company’s BOD. If that is the case, you may be able to leverage that relationship. Conversely you may be barred from conducting business with the organization due to a conflict of interest issue. More than likely, you can leverage the relationship.
Second, if you are selling at the executive level, you can not only find out about board members, who they are, what they earn, their stock and cash incentive plans, where they went to school, if they serve on other boards and what philanthropic organizations participate in. But you can also find information on executive team members. Here the information is more in-depth than on the company website. This kind of intelligence can be very helpful for you when trying to contact these people and making the right kind of connections with them.
There is a wealth of information available at the SEC website. If you aren’t leveraging this amazing and FREE resource – you should!
No comments:
Post a Comment