Your mind goes insane thinking about the possibilities of all this data…
IOS Partners Inc
IOS Partners Inc. is an international economic development and financial advisory services firm. They provide services to donor agencies, government institutions and the private sector. IOS Partners promote sound and sustained initiatives supporting the development of human capital, critical infrastructure, regional competitiveness, environmental sustainability, social inclusion, health, safety, and knowledge sharing around the world.
Problem: Lots of communication but no good contact list
IOS Partners has contacts all around the world. They were emailing these experts, clients, partner firms, etc., on a daily basis but their team didn’t have a working list in one place.
They’d often want to communicate with past customers or find all the vendors in a particular region. This was difficult since no one had a working list of contacts in the organization.
Old Solution: Manually finding contacts in email
Their solution for a long time had been to ask their team to scour years of their email hand picking contacts that could be in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or some other country and had a specific role. They would oftentimes have to wait days for a response from senior management on how to find a certain contact. This could take hours or days for multiple team members and wouldn’t yield a comprehensive list.
Eventually the IOS Partners leadership went searching for a better way of building a contact list for everyone in the organization to access.
During their research SigParser was discovered by the IT department.
New Solution: SigParser found 143,000 contacts automatically
Since IOS Partners conducted a large portion of their external communication over email, and it was primarily business to business style communication, this meant a majority of their emails had email signatures in them. These email signatures had contact information such as first and last names, email addresses, titles, phone numbers, company names and more.
SigParser processed and found:
- 3 email accounts for sales team members
- 100 GB of PST files
- 1.6 million emails processed
- 4.3 million nested email reply chains searched
- 143,000 contacts found
- 35,000 additional inbound marketing type contacts discovered
- 12,000 locations found
- 1,200 social media links found
Stephan Rich, Marketing and Communications Manager, said:
Your mind goes insane thinking about the possibilities of all this data. If you sit down and think about it–every person you want to email–you have it all. You can hire an employee to look at all this data manually, but they’d never do as good a job as SigParser. It is such a good deal to get all these contacts for 30 minutes of setup.
How IOS Partners use SigParser
IOS Partners use the list of contacts SigParser discovered every day. Here are the ways they’re using it.
### Finding contacts by location and role
Since IOS Partners is often working on projects around the world, finding resources and experts they've interacted with in the past is critical.
IOS Partners are able to use the advanced searching capabilities of SigParser to find contacts by country or region and title.
For example, IOS Partners could search for a fisheries expert in Somali.
Before SigParser this search would have taken hours or days. Now it takes minutes.
Improved Outreach Quality
When reconnecting with an old contact, the team member has the last contact information SigParser found for anyone else in the organization.
For example; they would know which internal IOS employee made the last contact, on what date and what the subject was. So now the team members have a better sense of the previous relationships.
This had led to a much better response.
Instead of writing
Dear _____________, just checking in…
It could be
John, it has been quite some time since my firm has worked with you on that project in Cambodia…
Reconnecting with old relationships
Often times they’ll find a contact in SigParser who someone in their organization used to interact with. It might not be clear how that contact is known though.
In SigParser the IOS Partners team members can easily see the last team member to have had communication with that contact. For example, it is easy to see that a team member was interacting with that contact 3 years ago and see the subjects of the emails to understand which product they were talking about.
Managing Junk / Unwanted emails
IOS had many unwanted emails but did not want to unsubscribe to these. SigParser was able to identify the real contacts and exclude those contacts who probably weren’t sending valuable communication. This gave IOS a much more refined contact list.
Populating a new CRM system
While researching CRM systems IOS Partners has been able to upload the contact list SigParser generated into various CRM systems. Without SigParser they’d have to start with an empty CRM and figure out how to collect all that contact information.
As a result, on day one IOS CRM system will have years of contact data including last communication dates, names, email addresses, phone numbers, titles, addresses and more. All this information is available without any manual data entry. Keeping their contacts updated Everyday SigParser monitors all the new inbound and outbound emails for contact data. This all then feeds into the above use cases as new and improved data. Once they select a CRM system, then SigParser will automatically keep the CRM system updated. IOS was not looking to hire a full time person to manage the contacts, so Sig Parser filled this need.
The team loves SigParser
Following is a real email from team members at IOS Partners to their coworkers.
Dear all,
Just wanted to share with you an example that shows SigParser is a fantastic resource.
I was trying to find a contact email for … from [removed]. Nothing was coming out in my Outlook or Rackspace search and [removed] could not find her email either in Applicant Stack, or Google. And, it was frustrating as I know I have been in contact with her a million times.
In SigParser, it took me one second to find her, I saw all my interactions with her; I could also see all the other contacts from …, the trail of communication by all IOS people through the years, even if the emails were active, frequently used, going cold or inactive.
This really has the potential to make our life much easier when we look for contacts or want country or organizational lists of contacts - let’s make sure we make the most of it and also think how to integrate it throughout the company.
Interested in Learning More about SigParser
Contact us for a demo. We’ll show you how to leverage the emails your business generates to capture every relationship detail and eliminate manual data entry.