Isaac Waby, Author at DVS - Data Vision Services

AI Enrichment Tool: Enabling B2B SaaS Value Creation

Isaac Waby — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:05:58 +0000

introduction

Good enrichment data can significantly drive revenue growth for B2B SaaS companies, yet it is often either unavailable or comes at a high cost
At DVS, we have developed an AI-powered enrichment tool that helps you enhance your customer data with valuable attributes such as industry, sub-industry, employee count, and key decision-makers
Interested in seeing how it works? Watch the short demo below, and feel free to contact us if you want to explore value-creation opportunities for your B2B SaaS business!

watch our ai tool demo

why is this important?

Quality enrichment data enables B2B SaaS companies to enhance revenue through the expansion of both existing and new accounts
For instance, this can involve increasing the size of existing accounts with personalised offers that encourage cross-selling and upselling, or scoring and identifying leads based on factors like industry, size, and location
However, quality data is not guaranteed for B2B RevOps and sales teams. In fact, 92% of RevOps teams report that poor data quality hinders their ability to execute their go-to-market strategies
Additionally, current market tools can be expensive, with costs often exceeding $15,000 annually or only covering one-off data sets

how dvs can help you

We’ve built an AI-powered enrichment tool that enables B2B software businesses to create richer, more useful attributes for each customer or prospect —such as industry, sub-industry, headcount, and decision-maker contacts
Our tool is built from publicly available sources, delivered as bespoke datasets tailored to your business, and does not require engineering

This isn’t off-the-shelf aggregator data; it’s targeted enrichment that we also utilise in our strategic analytics work, including lead scoring, retention modelling, pricing, and go-to-market design

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Sweeping US Tariffs: What This Means for the UK

Isaac Waby — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:22:45 +0000

INTRODUCTION

On the 2nd of April 2025, President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on all goods imports into the United States.
Practically this means that all countries are facing at least 10% US import tariffs, with many facing far higher percentages.
In addition to these “reciprocal tariffs”, imports from all countries will face blanket 25% US import tariffs on steel, aluminium and automotive imports.
The UK is not exempt, though has the lowest reciprocal tariff percentage at 10%. Particularly impacted sectors are automotive and steel, which face the higher 25% tariffs. Key sectors without direct impacts are pharmaceuticals and services – which are both exempt from tariffs.

7% of overall uk exports are impacted

The tariffs only impact goods. Where US bound exports make up 7% (£60bn) of overall UK exports (£861bn) and 15% of goods exports (£394bn). 2023 Figures
Critically, these tariffs do not impact services exports (and thus the large financial and professional services industry in the UK) – where the US is an even more signficant market than it is for goods.

iNDUSTRIES ARE NOT EQUALLY IMPACTED

Within goods exports, not all industries are subject to the 10% tariff – with some facing 25% tariffs and some exempt.
Automotive, steel and aluminium exports to the US are subject to the higher 25% tariff.
There are 0% tariff exemptions for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, lumber, copper, gold, energy resources and selected minerals not available in the US.

The worst impacted industries are those both with high exposure to the US market and high tariffs like automotive and steel, but also aerospace, chemicals, machinery and precision instruments.

Where the automotive sector is clearly exposed with one in eight UK made passenger cars (and 20% of value) being exported to the US.
Research by the University of Birmingham calculates that the impact to UK GDP will be £10bn between 2025 and 2030, with 137,000 jobs at risk. 85% of this impact is expected to be felt in the West Midlands and North West, impacting British brands like Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin.

Where are we going from here?

There are early signs that the UK may eventually be able to negotiate favourable exemptions from some of these tariffs, coming from both White House and Downing Street insiders. Though there are no active or official announcements to this effect.
There are likely to be further second and third degree consquences to these actions, as they meaningfully shift global supply chains and international trading relationships, with follow on impact to the UK. The exact form of these is hard to forsee.
It is possible that the UK might gain competitive advantages in some sectors e.g. Scotch versus Irish whiskey in the US market (10% vs 20% tariffs) or UK versus US services in the EU market (especially if the EU follows through with reciprocal tariffs targeting US services.
Tariffs will directly impact profit margins and sales volumes in the US market for impacted products, and other than reprioritising to new markets or relocation production to the US, there is little that impacted firms can do to mitigate these impacts.

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From data to decisions: what sets leading RevOps teams apart

Isaac Waby — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:00:12 +0000

INTRODUCTION

RevOps, sitting at the intersection of sales, marketing, customer success, and finance, is evolving fast. As more organisations look to drive growth efficiently, the pressure is on to make better, faster decisions. That depends on clean, connected data and the ability to extract real insight from it.
At DVS, we work with high-growth and private equity-backed businesses to make that happen. We’re an end-to-end RevOps partner. We help define where data and analytics should be deployed to create strategic value, and we build the capabilities to support it—automating data flows, aligning teams, and delivering reporting that drives action.
Last week, we joined a session hosted by the RevOps Co-op: “The Good Enough Data Trap: Hard Truths from the 2025 State of RevOps Report.” It was packed with insight into where teams are getting stuck and what the best are doing differently.

AI IS ENTERING THE REVOPS MAINSTREAM

Around 80% of RevOps teams are experimenting with AI, from predictive analytics to content generation. Generative AI is especially useful for unlocking insights from messy, unstructured data. But adoption and impact remain uneven. The common blockers? A lack of clarity on use cases, weak data foundations, and internal capability gaps.

For CFOs and CEOs, the real question is: are our data and systems actually helping us make faster, sharper commercial decisions – or just adding more noise?

data quality erodes performance

More than 40% of respondents said their data was “good enough,” yet over 70% admitted it was undermining their ability to execute. Whether it’s segmentation, forecasting, or lead routing, small data issues quickly add up. They affect decision-making, slow down teams, and ultimately hold back growth.

This isn’t just a hygiene issue. It’s a performance issue.

the real gap is strategic alignment

One of the most telling stats from the report: 79% of companies with poor data quality don’t have a shared definition of what “good” looks like. Nearly half said leadership lacks visibility into the technical reality.

This isn’t about cleaning up Salesforce or buying another tool. It’s about aligning the business – across finance, sales, marketing, and ops—on what matters, how to measure it, and how to act on it.

Without that, systems become fragmented, reports become inconsistent, and valuable time is wasted reconciling numbers instead of using them.

what leading teams do differently

The high performers aren’t necessarily spending more – they’re getting clearer, faster. They:

Define what “quality” data means in the context of their commercial goals
Align cross-functional teams on shared metrics and systems
Automate low-value manual work to free up time for high-impact tasks
Give leaders access to timely, reliable insight they can act on

How DVS helps

DVS is an end-to-end RevOps partner. We help high-growth and PE-backed businesses turn information into a competitive advantage by combining strategy, systems and delivery.

Strategy consulting. We work with CFOs, CMOs, CROs and their teams to define where data and analytics can drive value. That includes selecting the right KPIs, aligning teams on metrics, and building the roadmap for data-enabled growth.
Building data capabilities. We prepare, clean and automate the data flows that power consistent, scalable reporting across the commercial organisation – from marketing performance through to pipeline, conversion, and retention.
Insight infrastructure. We design and implement tools that turn data into action. Dashboards, forecasts, and decision-support systems that leaders can rely on.
Driving alignment. We help teams build a shared source of truth, with platforms and processes that encourage real collaboration.
AI-powered data enrichment. We’ve developed a proprietary enrichment engine that scrapes publicly available sources – like company websites, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia – to enhance CRM and go-to-market data. That enriched layer gives you a stronger foundation for targeting, segmentation, and predictive modelling, and unlocks more value from both machine learning and generative AI.

If you’re trying to turn data into a real growth lever – not just a reporting layer – we’d love to help.

We’d also be curious to hear how others are thinking about this.

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Understanding performance versus market in a complex and changing environment

Isaac Waby — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 12:54:24 +0000

Executive Summary

Multi-year strategic plans need to be reviewed and iterated on regularly when market conditions are changing
A clear set of evidence and tested hypotheses, brought together through overarching themes, needs to form the basis of this review
Building a view of the near and mid-term future is critical to increasing the life span of strategic plans

The Challenge

We recently carried out a commercial diagnostic for a PE-backed clothing wholesale and retail business. The client were looking to understand their performance versus market so they could develop a multi-year strategic plan. Both their market and operating model had faced significant change which presented difficulty in understanding the root causes of recent performance. The specific challenges included:

Market

Shifting Legislation: Changing government guidance on spending limits for a key product segment
Cost-of-Living Pressures: Growing price sensitivity among consumers
Rising Competition and Second Hand: New entrants intensifying the battle for market share

Internal

Acquisition-Driven Growth: The wholesale client had acquired retailers, resulting in significant operational complexity being introduced
Pricing Uncertainty: Lack of clarity around setting prices and monitoring margins
Quality of Service: Extended lead times and shipping costs introduced additional challenges to a service-sensitive customer base

Our approach

To uncover the root causes, we used a hypothesis-driven performance diagnostic. We worked closely with members of the key business functions to collate a series of hypotheses. We then assessed the relative importance of these hypotheses using various techniques:

Market Modelling

We built market models for both the retail and wholesale arms of the business to enable us to assess performance relative to market
Key variables, such as the rise of second hand and government legislation, were assessed to understand their impact on the current and potential future market
Used a combination of competitor research, expert interviews and consumer surveys to calculate triangulation points

Internal Analysis

We used our analytics expertise to aggregate disparate data systems across all acquisitions, enabling us to understand organic and inorganic performance
Analysing sales performance across product and customer segments allowed us to understand the key areas which our client were winning and losing in

Competitor Benchmarking

We analysed customer sentiment for our client and their competitors to understand how service challenges had changed customer preferences
Conducted a price benchmarking exercise to understand the product types and regions where price competitiveness had risen

The combination of these methodologies allowed us to formulate a view on our clients performance versus market. More importantly, testing hypotheses meant that the key drivers could be assessed for their strength of impact on the performance.

Impact

Our commercial diagnostic illuminated the precise causes of performance by highlighting both market-driven and internal operational challenges. We equipped our client with a clear view of where critical issues currently lay and where they may arise in the future. This gave our client the clarity needed to develop a multi-year strategic plan.

If you’re interested in understanding your performance drivers in more detail via a commercial MOT, please contact us at contact@datavisionservices.co.uk to see how we can best work together.

"CDD quality work - the most valuable project we have done for years"

Portfolio Company CEO

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Budget 2024: Bigger impacts in sectors with high wage bills and low average pay

Isaac Waby — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 22:17:29 +0000

The 2024 UK Budget, introduced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, is projected to raise £40bn of incremental revenue for the Treasury. Whilst changes were long signalled, now that the details have been released, DVS have explored how the specific changes around National Insurance may affect businesses in different sectors.

Given the Government chose to increase Employer’s National Insurance rather than Corporation Tax, this impact is higher on those with high wage bills. The structure of the changes to the lower threshold means that those with more staff on lower salaries will be harder felt.

Businesses are doing much of the heavy lifting in this budget, with £25bn on the £40bn raised coming from the 1.2% increase in employer NICs

The gross pay threshold at which employer national insurance is paid decreases from £9100 per year to £5000 per year
The percentage rate paid on gross pay above this amount increases from 13.8% to 15.0%
Increasing hourly minimum wage from £11.44 to £12.21 will also represent a significant cost for businesses, particularly for those employing a high percentage of their workforce at or near the minimum wage

In terms of impact on payroll costs, the highest percentage increases will be felt in sectors with higher proportion of staff on minimum wage, and lower average salaries

Figure 1. Increase in payroll costs by % of staff on minimum wage, and average salary of full-time staff overall

In practice, these changes will represent a 0.5-3.0% EBITDA (bottom line) headwind for most, with more labour-intensive businesses paying lower salaries hit hardest

Figure 2. Change in % EBITDA bottom line by payroll cost as % of revenue (Assuming 15% of staff on minimum wage and average salary of £30000.

The implication of this is that some industries will be relatively more impacted by the changes in terms of their bottom line

Figure 3. Estimated EBITDA impacted by industry (Assuming 15% of staff on minimum wage). N.B. a representative range of affected industries have been included here, with select industries broken out to highlight impact.

Low-wage, labour intensive industries like cleaning, care and customer support the most impacted by the changes in cost. Hospitality and retail payrolls are also increasing significantly by c.5%, but where the EBITDA impact is lower due to a lower labour cost burden.

There is a range of mitigations and strategies that should be considered by owners to prepare their businesses for these changes

Operational Efficiency:
1. Automation and Technology: Investing in automation can reduce reliance on labour, thereby minimising payroll expenses. We expect to see continued support for the use of AI in customer support and call centre roles
1. Shift to Less Labour-Intensive Business Models: In retail for example, this is likely to further incentivise movement to online & omni-channel
Financial Planning:
1. Budget Reassessment: Revising budgets to account for higher payroll taxes and business rates is essential for maintaining financial health
1. Tax Planning: Engaging in proactive tax planning can help identify opportunities to minimise tax burdens within legal frameworks
Employee Compensation Strategies:
1. Likely Impact to Wage Growth: Many employers may simply scale back planned pay increases to accommodate higher minimum wage and NIC contributions
1. Staffing Structure Review: The reduction in the employer NIC allowance threshold from £9,100 to £5,000 may reduce the tax efficiency of employing multiple part-time workers instead of a single full-time employee
1. Flexible Working Arrangements: This may incentivise companies to re-visit their hybrid or remote working policies to reduce overheads

Conclusion

The 2024 Budget introduces increased payroll costs and tax adjustments, which will undoubtedly present challenges for many businesses, especially those with higher labour costs and lower average compensation – such as Cleaning, Personal Care and Call Centres.

This likely provides a further catalyst for strategic and efficient transformation in impacted sectors including labour efficiency maximisation, strategy & process optimisation and deployment of artificial intelligence.

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