SMB company leveraging D&B to assess business risk for customers and vendors

We obtain reports on all current and prospective customers, leverage real-time alerts when there's a significant negative condition that might effect the solvency or payment potential for our customers. So far the alerts have tracked with events that we have learned about through other means, and other alerts have been mysterious at the time but were harbingers of things to come. So far we are still working out all the various ways that we can directly leverage this information as a business, but having access to additional business risk information and other hard-to-uncover details about businesses has been useful.

Thus far it's primarily been interesting and prompted internal discussion, but no specific organizational risk analysis changes have yet been implemented around D&B. Right now, we've been tracking to see how much we can rely on the timeliness and details within the alerts to determine if they seem to have a basis in something that might be relevant to our relationships.

With the help of the onboarding specialist, we got D&B setup with all our customers with minimal effort - maybe 3 hours total. The training and guidance has been solid. The tricky part is adapting our systems and processes to incorporate D&B and ensure we're assessing our prospective customers reliably and in the right sequence in the sales discovery cycle.