We promise that blogging from our product managers will start again soon, but in the meantime, here’s more from the Marketing and PR front…

In honor of National Small Business Week, through May 30, 2012, we’re offering a 50% savings on our brand new BusinessIQ Express tool — just $375 for an annual subscription rather than $750.  It’s designed especially for small businesses and is the one-stop-shop for evaluating, monitoring and collecting from your B2B prospects, customers, suppliers and partners.

Small businesses sometimes aren’t familiar with the need to view credit history and financial background – or the need to monitor current customers. The reason evaluating and monitoring are so important is that they help identify and manage risk.  For instance, I would be less likely to sell to a business branded as ‘high risk’ because of their history of late payments and tax liens.  Also, I would want to be alerted if a regular customer suddenly filed for bankruptcy.  Having background knowledge could help me avoid the risk by declining the business or requiring cash payment.

In addition, it can sometimes be hard to collect from delinquent accounts. BusinessIQ Express provides easy-to-use letter templates and even additional contact information.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of the discount, go to: http://www.businessiqexpress.com/smallbusinessweek.

Are you a small business owner or do you know one? At FinovateSpring 2012 this morning, we announced BusinessIQ Express, an exciting online tool designed to help small businesses keep the cash flowing by helping them make smarter decisions about the businesses they work with. The tool helps users:

• Evaluate prospects, customers, suppliers and partners on their likelihood to pay on time
• Monitor business relationships via alerts and notifications of key changes
• Collect on outstanding debts and avoid future losses

In addition, it houses a library of tutorial videos and educational information including whitepapers as well as live customer service – everything a small business needs to make informed, insightful decisions. 

BusinessIQ Express is a complete package for one compelling price! (There’s even an option to user limited services as a free member.)

In the world of Corporate Linkage I often hear, “linkage is never finished”.  What do I mean by this statement?  Change is constant in today’s business environment.  Some businesses are starting up while others are closing their doors.  Businesses are acquired and businesses merge.  That is why at Experian we constantly monitor for changes in Corporate Hierarchies that may impact your business. 

Do you do business with Microsoft or Skype?  If you do, you may be interested to know Microsoft announced on October 13^th their acquisition of Skype was complete.  At Experian we started monitoring for this event back in May when Microsoft announced their intention to acquire Skype.  We didn’t make changes to our database upon an announcement.  We waited until the regulators and shareholders approved the acquisition and for the legal ownership change to occur.  This change in ownership is our trigger to update the database and make this information available to you – real time!

The ability to actively monitor for business changes and make real-time database updates is just one of the unique advantages of Experian’s Corporate Linkage offering.  How do we do this?  Well there’s definitely a bit of magic that comes from our technology, but there’s a human touch as well.  Sitting just a few desks over from where I sit is our team of talented Linkage Analysts; the human touch to Experian’s linkage offering. If you have not checked out Experian’s Corporate Linkage recently, you can learn more here.

All too often as credit risk professionals, we don’t take the time to evaluate our credit policies because “that’s how it has always been done around here”. Unfortunately, it is this sheer mentality that increases days sales outstanding, raises uncollectable debt and prohibits us from identifying  good growth opportunities.  Reviewing your policies early and often enables credit risk professionals to  create more sophisticated rules around how to extend credit.

One way to establish a clear cut set of rules around your credit policy is to automate your credit decision making process. I know when some credit professionals hear the word “automation”, they run the other way. Typically, two concerns come to mind: 1) A computer is going to take my job away OR 2.) Credit automation is too expensive!  Well – Guess what?  Neither of these is necessarily true.

Automating your credit policy simply allows credit risk professionals to focus on the important things that matter when making credit decisions. Ultimately – a good credit decisioning system allows good applicants to get automatically approved and the bad applicants to get automatically declined without getting you involved.  Your time is most efficiently spent on the accounts that need human intervention – applications that fall on the cusp of a decision. This analysis even a computer can’t do! 

Most credit automation tools have come a long way. The market now offers various ‘out of the box’ solutions depending on the level of automation desired by your company. Once a costly tool – now it’s a cost savings tool!

How do you know if your business is ready to automate your credit decision making process? Take this self-diagnosis test. If you answer “YES” to any of these questions – it’s time to pull the trigger on automated credit decisioning!

• Is your credit operation decentralized with multiple regional analysts making decisions independent of one another?
•  Are you having issues establishing an audit trail on credit line extensions?
• Are you finding inconsistencies on how analysts assign out credit limits?
• Do you think your credit analysts are spending too much time manually reviewing credit applications?

 If you answered ‘YES’ to any one of these questions – automating your credit policy just might be the solution you’ve been looking for. So what are you waiting for? Pull the trigger!

I usually like to schedule my annual physical around my birthday. It’s a natural reminder to visit my physician to identify any potential issues or suggestions of how I can improve my health.

Like an annual physical, benchmarking your portfolio on a regular basis is a great way to identify both risks and opportunities for your business. So what is benchmarking? Webster’s online defines it as “The process of identifying, understanding, and adapting best-in-class practices and processes from other organizations, as well as within your own organization, to help your organization improve its performance.”

There are many metrics you can benchmark, but here are some ideas that can help make your benchmarking program successful.

• Define your purpose – What are your goals (identify market opportunities, improve internal processes, etc?)
• Define your metrics – Consult with stakeholders to define the metrics that will best help you achieve your goals.
• Define your scope – Start with a manageable number of metrics and evolve over time. 

Benchmarking provides powerful information you can use to plan business strategies, identify market opportunities and more effectively communicate your portfolio performance to senior management. To learn more about how portfolio benchmarking can help you click here