How Crowdcube use Beauhurst to power their sales approach

Main uses of Beauhurst

- Identify and approach new clients
- Stay up to date with industry trends
- Keep an eye on competitors
- Enrich their CRM data

Beauhurst is a single source of truth on the UK’s high-growth economy – it truly is our guiding light in finding the right businesses to approach.

Jonny Day, Head of Sales OPerations

About the company

Crowdcube is one of the leading crowdfunding platforms in the UK, giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to raise capital from their own network of friends, family, customers and strangers.

As Head of Sales Operations, Jonny’s role is to win new business, optimize the performance of the sales team, and help establish Crowdcube as the preferred avenue for exciting young companies to access finance.

Finding a data tool that works for Crowdcube

Crowdcube has historically used a variety of different data sources to carry out our business development function. From Dealroom, Crunchbase, Startups 100, to lists of top 10 companies, we’ve generally used a much more sporadic range of tools rather than paying for subscriptions. We are now paying subscribers of Beauhurst and Pitchbook, but have found it easier to use one tool and learn how to use it really well. Unlike its competitors, Beauhurst has comprehensive coverage of UK fundraisings, so we’re no longer using Pitchbook as actively.

How they use Beauhurst to to win new clients and keep up to date with the latest industry trends

Beauhurst data highlights the companies that are already doing really well in their growth journey and allows us to approach them at the right time through the best route possible. We use corporate structure and ownership tabs to find a way in to a company, and see whether we have any existing connections. Regular email updates about transactions and news stories mean we can approach them at the right time, when they’re most likely to be looking to raise.

When I’m not directly using the platform, email alerts keep me up to date with who’s raising money in the sectors I’m most interested in, which companies our competitors are funding, as well as what’s going on in the broader ecosystem so I can keep up with key trends.

How they use Beauhurst to develop their sales approach

We regularly export Beauhurst data from the platform and feed it through our own machine learning algorithms. One project involved predicting when a company is likely to raise again, combining Beauhurst data with Crowdcube knowledge to drive sales opportunities.

As a company, we’re trying to adjust our approach to relationships with clients. It’s vital that we build a relationship with that company across every single area of the business, not just through the sales team. It’s therefore essential for us to have a single source of information on a company that everyone can work from.

Because of this, we’re always enriching our own CRM data with context from Beauhurst – instead of adding loads of new fields, we just add a link to a company’s Beauhurst profile. That way, anyone who wants more detail can click through and see the journey that the business and entrepreneurs behind them have been through.

The results of using Beauhurst

We’ve been using the platform for the past 4 years and have been growing consistently in that time – it’s fair to say that a huge element of this success is down to Beauhurst.

Beauhurst helps drive efficiency within my team, steering us towards the right businesses to approach. Once we’ve identified the companies we can quickly get a really comprehensive overview of the business; all the info we need is readily available on the platform. It’s a single source of truth which helps streamline every stage of the sales process.