Case study
Generating Targeted
Sales Leads with
Literatum’s business intelligence solution.
Background
ICE Publishing is a division of the Institution of Civil Engineers, home to the ICE Virtual Library, the world’s
largest online resource for civil engineers. ICE Publishing issues 35 front-list academic journals as well as
about 20 books per year. The library itself houses publications that go back to 1836. ICE has hosted its
content on Literatum since 2015.
Challenge
To improve the quality of leads for their UK sales team and increase their win rates.
Solution
ICE used Passport Analytics to analyze its journal website usage data and identify not only which institutions
would be most likely to purchase a subscription but also the specific journals to which each institution would
be most likely to subscribe.
Denials for each
journal, by institution
Using Passport Analytics’ drag-and-drop report creation interface, ICE determined the number of times
in the past three months that users attempted to download or read full-text articles.
After eliminating the statistical noise of usage spikes from unrelated activity, they filtered out the successful
access attempts in order to display only denied attempts—occasions when users attempted to access
paywall-protected materials to which their institution was not subscribed. OVER
Top 10 sales leads
for all journals.
They refined the filtering further for content available via subscription—in this case, all content published
before 2003—then drilled down to determine from which institutions the majority of the denials originated.
Top 10 UK sales leads
for the journal with
the most denials.
Finally, they determined which journals those institutions’ users had tried to access. Drilling down one more
level, ICE generated a list of the top ten institutions most interested in that journal. They then sorted by
country for the institutions located in the UK.
Reports on each data set were visualized in easy-to-understand full-color charts and graphs, allowing ICE
to easily determine which journal was generating the highest level of interest as well as the highest rate of
denials.
Result
Passport Analytics’ flexible data exploration tools and highly granular reporting provided ICE with the top
ten sales leads in the UK. By arming their UK reps with definitive behavioral data on each institution’s users,
Passport Analytics accelerated their sales cycle and increased their win rates.