Veolia Energy: Why Company Data Is Essential for B2B Sales

You can’t do business without data. Today, virtually no business can operate without them. They help manage sales and simplify work. But having data is one thing — the far more important part is knowing how to read, connect, and correctly interpret them. Veolia Energie ČR, a leading service provider on the Czech energy market, knows this well. Thanks to their partnership with BizMachine, they have all the necessary information about their business partners in one place and can access it within seconds.

Vladimír Hanák, Deputy Commercial Director for Development, and Jakub Hřídel, Project Manager at Veolia Energie ČR, spoke with our sales representative Pavla Denková about how they use BizMachine data in Salesforce and how they jointly tamed the hours spent monitoring public procurement.

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Tell us a bit more about your sales teams. What specifically do you focus on?

Vladimír: The development team covers our entire portfolio of activities in energy, water management, and waste management. We focus on industrial companies, municipalities, and public institutions such as schools, healthcare facilities, and similar. Jakub is part of the development team for industrial activities and EPC, managing our portfolio growth.

We added BizMachine Prospector to our regular company monitoring that comes via email. A bit later, we started using BizMachine company data directly in our CRM. Getting to know BizMachine’s Prospector and implementing the new CRM with Mooza were actually two projects that went hand in hand for us. And it was logical to look for ways to integrate more advanced company data directly into Salesforce.

Who most frequently uses the company data in your CRM?

Vladimír: We need a lot of data for our work. BizMachine data helps us when we want to filter potential customers by specific parameters. Based on the data, we can then evaluate potential and identify business opportunities. Our project managers, who are in direct contact with customers, use Prospector.

Is there any other purpose for which you use BizMachine data?

Vladimír: When creating a new case in our CRM (Salesforce), all important information is automatically populated after entering the company’s ID. We don’t have to look it up anywhere, which is very convenient and facilitates our first contact with the customer. With all data in one place, we can quickly and comfortably do an initial screening of the company, check the potential risk indicator based on the company’s market behavior along with margin data or revenue trends, and we can immediately see information about connected persons or companies as well.

It sounds like the financial health of a potential customer is very important to you.

Vladimír: Yes, it is. We have many investment-type projects. If we didn’t know who we’re dealing with, we might invest a lot of time and effort into a project that ultimately can’t be realized. This can now be largely prevented thanks to the data we have available through BizMachine in Salesforce.

That makes sense. Do you also use any non-financial data?

Vladimír: We mainly use BizMachine data for first meetings with clients. Right in our CRM, we can click through to additional details and in Prospector browse recent media news about the company. We no longer need to scour the internet for this information. This significantly saves our project managers’ time, giving them an almost instant initial screening of a potential customer. They can then decide how to approach them. During meetings, they can also verify certain things directly in BizMachine data, or find something in recent articles about the company to start casual small talk to get the meeting flowing.

So you use data throughout the entire sales case… How complex was the BizMachine data integration into Salesforce?

Vladimír: From our perspective, it wasn’t a big effort. We just identified which data we’d need from BizMachine Prospector directly in the CRM, and you and Mooza did the rest. But integrating data into the CRM is one thing. It was painless, useful, and saves time. But we saw much greater potential. We saw an opportunity to use data analytics for public procurement screening and monitoring. That seemed like quite a tough nut to crack.

Can you describe in more detail what you mean by public procurement screening?

Jakub: COVID, which hit last spring, complicated our business activities overall. So we looked for other development opportunities and began focusing more on the public procurement sector, which represents another source of potential business. For our small team, going through all sources of public procurement information was quite time-consuming. Evaluating which ones to pursue requires additional time and effort. So we were looking for ways to simplify and, above all, streamline our work. We even considered hiring a part-timer to monitor new public tenders and find those suitable for us. But we agreed it would be wiser to completely eliminate the human factor, tune into the 21st century, and leverage new technology. We built on our previous trouble-free cooperation with BizMachine. They were very willing to accommodate our requirements and custom-built a public procurement monitoring system for us.

What should I imagine when you talk about custom procurement monitoring?

Jakub: Tens of thousands of public tenders are published every year. And logically, we’re not interested in all of them. But searching on most portals where they’re listed doesn’t work ideally. Finding the relevant ones wasn’t easy — it was very labor-intensive. Today, instead of keeping keywords in my head and laboriously browsing various portals with new public tenders, randomly reading those that look interesting, I receive automatically generated outputs from BizMachine in a spreadsheet. Thanks to smart analysis running in the background, I can see all relevant public tenders for us. In literally seconds, I now have an overview of which tenders in our area have been newly published. No public tender escapes our radar. We know about all of them in time. And the time we save searching can be used much more effectively — for example, devoted to our clients or other business development activities.

It sounds like the report saves you a lot of work. Was it labor-intensive to set everything up to work as you envisioned?

Jakub: Our job was to define the keywords BizMachine uses to search for suitable public tenders across all important Czech portals. We cover the Public Procurement Bulletin, and also monitor portals like NEN, Portál dodavatele, ePoptávka, or Agrofert Promitea.

Vladimír: I must admit that at the beginning we had quite naive ideas about which portals we wanted to monitor. By adding sources gradually, we could test how many tenders we’d see and how relevant they were. On the fly, we changed not only the scope of monitored sources but also the keywords. Here I must appreciate BizMachine’s flexibility. We changed the brief on the go. Initially, a certain scope was planned, and during the project we discovered our needs were different than originally thought. Adding some sources was inefficient and didn’t bring any new relevant data. So we gradually fine-tuned everything to make sense from all perspectives.

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Wasn’t the process itself lengthy? How would you describe the cooperation with BizMachine?

Vladimír: If we wanted results faster, we’d have had to dedicate more time from our side. If I could advise someone embarking on a similar project with you, I’d recommend they select and dedicate a project manager. Jakub handled everything for us, but he also had to attend to his other work — his customer portfolio. So it wasn’t possible for him to fully dedicate himself solely to this new public procurement monitoring project. But I’m glad he managed to wrap it up so quickly together with you.

So would you recommend the cooperation to others?

Jakub: Absolutely. It was trouble-free and BizMachine always accommodated us. When we realized our needs were actually somewhat different and changed the entire brief, it wasn’t a problem.

Vladimír: Exactly. On BizMachine’s side, we never had to deal with any scheduling issues. Whenever a request needed to be addressed, it was handled urgently and immediately. Which is the most important factor for me when partners are meant to collaborate. Communication and interaction must flow smoothly between both sides. And here I have no complaints. (laughs)

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Veolia Energie ČR is one of the most significant producers and suppliers of heat, cooling, electricity, and other energy commodities. It is also a European leader in providing energy services for cities, municipalities and their residents, healthcare and educational facilities, industrial companies, public institutions, and tertiary sector clients.

Learn more on the Veolia Energie ČR website.