Radius Brings Sales Intelligence on Small Businesses to All Businesses

It’s pretty hard to get good information on small businesses, and very hard to get info on very small businesses, which is why a company called Radius caught my attention.  While they’ve been around for about three years, they officially launched their cloud-based sales intelligence service yesterday. 

What makes their service interesting is its focus on gathering information on companies with 100 employees or less.  And they’ve spent a great deal of time finding sources to pull together to do it, including:

• Upwards of 60,000 local blogs
• Thousands of news sites
• Social sites and review sites like Urban Spoon and City Search
• Local public records like liquor licenses, business licenses, etc.

During a conversation I had with Radius Founder & CEO Darian Shirazi last week, he mentioned that they are continuously maintaining half a billion pieces of data on small businsses – and adding 20-30 million new pieces of data each month.

Radius has a nice interface that makes it easy to “find” and then “follow” a local business, and see what people are saying about them.  You can even track sentiment trends using the dashboard:

Radius also integrates with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so once you find a business you can have that info moved over into your system as an account, contact or lead.

There’s no actual credit scoring as of yet, but Shirazi said their goal is to eventually be to small business information what Dun & Bradstreet is for the enterprise market.

According to their press release:

• Users can customize any search to find specific businesses that meet their criteria. For example, users can search in a city for all the restaurants with a 4-star rating that ran a daily deal within the past two months.
• Users can also track the success of recent campaigns, such as previous ads or daily deals to better understand how to work with a customer. They can even see if the company is advertising with another service.   

After getting a demo I really liked what I saw.  The data seemed to be pretty good – we even found a small business right here in Stockbridge, GA and checked out a few online reviews Radius pulled together.  It’s also priced so that businesses of any size can use the service – starting at $39/mo per user. 

All in all if you’re one of the ten million sales people who are selling to the under-100 employee business crowd, this is a service you may want to check out.  With records on 15 million of these kinds of businesses it’s definitely worth a look.