Workiva, a connected reporting cloud-based platform company, supports financial reporting by transforming how business data is managed and reported. We spoke with Steve Soter, Workiva’s senior director of product marketing, to determine how he uses Audit Analytics to explore new client opportunities, support existing clients and optimize workflow.
Prospecting New Clients Using Risk Indicators
As Steve describes, Audit Analytics data, particularly the Accounting Quality & Risk Matrix that accompanies detailed company profiles, is used to add insight to the risk indicators of companies that would potentially benefit from the Workiva platform.
As part of their customer segmentation exercises, Workiva uses those risk indicators to focus on companies that would most likely benefit from enhancing their financial reporting process.
“We take existing company profiles and can layer on additional perspective from the accounting quality risk model… if a company had a material weakness or a restatement, they’re probably thinking about their financial reporting processes. That naturally lends itself well to a discussion with Workiva.”
Expanding Opportunities with Existing Clients
Workiva has recently begun exploring new ways to incorporate information from databases powered by Audit Analytics, such as Accounting Quality & Risk, Restatements and Controls. According to Steve, Audit Analytics plays an important role for Workiva – the data helps deepen understanding why customers bought Workiva and identify what other problems may exist that Workiva can help solve.
“What I like about using Audit Analytics is that it focuses on risks, those things that really speak to a company’s profile, and helps us determine what we could be doing to add value for our customers…”
Understanding Client Buying Decisions to Achieve Better Outcomes
In addition to their segmentation efforts, Workiva uses Audit Analytics data to understand current customers better and discover what underlies those customers’ buying decisions, informing future prospecting opportunities.
“[With Audit Analytics] we are able to analytically determine which companies would be interested in Workiva, which is then validated by current opportunities or discussions that we have with those companies.”
Optimize Workflow
The data provided by Audit Analytics provides unique insights into specific client and prospect issues for Workiva, and, as Steve explains, also provides a look at overall industry trends to find critical indicators.
Audit Analytics does the data collection from thousands of publicly available documents, saving time and energy when creating risk profiles for individual companies, or even the entire Russell 3000.
“To manually put together a risk profile for the entire Russell 3000 would take months. With Audit Analytics, I can pull that report and have access to all that data in a matter of seconds.”
For more information about Audit Analytics or this analysis, please contact us.
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