1. Select your ideal customers in your CRM
In this step, you first dive into your own data: which customers offer you the best margins, smoothest collaborations, and are the most satisfied with your product or service?
2. Uploading to openthebox
Export your ideal customers into your CRM, open them in Excel or such an application, and select their VAT numbers. You can then copy and paste that list into openthebox.
Once you've created your Entity List based on your portfolio, you can open that list in your Advanced Search.
3. Analyze their shared characteristics
Getting to know your Ideal Customer Profile better is what you do by identifying shared (financial) characteristics across the entire list. You can discover them quickly and easily in openthebox's Advanced Search.
For this example, we rely on the list of family businesses that De Tijd mapped out in 2024.
Here, for example, we quickly learn that almost all of these companies are holdings, with a turnover of between €1M and €100M, for example. They often have a negative EBITDA, perhaps due to their high level of investment activity.
However, we also see where they are mainly based, what form of company they use, what their Equity is, and how many staff they usually employ. Again, these are just a few examples of conclusions.
With these conclusions, we can set up a new Advanced Search ourselves.
4. Find similar companies
If we use these parameters, we can find more companies with the same characteristics. A very simple Advanced Search will then provide us with no less than 642 companies. Suddenly, we also know something about the potential of this market.
5. Find related companies
It doesn't end there. In addition to companies with similar parameters, openthebox also allows you to easily find out which companies are in the extensive network of your current portfolio.
If we apply that again to family businesses, we get this: 100 additional companies. If these include companies that fall under your ICP, a warm introduction is suddenly very possible!
