Radius, the newly rebranded company formerly known as Fwix, is closing the small business sales intelligence gap with a new application targeting the smaller firms. The small business market comprises approximately 65 percent of the US economy, yet it is greatly under-serviced and under-represented when it comes to sales intelligence.

As the first application of its kind to specifically target small and medium business, Fwix is an acknowledgement of the important part smaller businesses play in the economy. Back in March 2012, the Office of Advocacy released its Small Business Economy 2011 showing that smaller businesses outperformed larger companies in job creation consistently, with around six million smaller firms employing people across the country, according to Market Watch.

Radius has launched a new sales intelligence platform aimed at remedying the problem of under-representing small business by providing sales teams with real-time, targeted, and local data about small and midsize businesses. This ostensibly will enables sales teams to better service the small business market.

Radius is collecting the data from multiple sources, including social networking sites, government sites, and even local news sites and collating it on a dashboard-style interface that will allow salespeople to more easily track and discover leads in the small business market. Traditionally, sales intelligence centered around larger corporations and was gathered through call centers and surveys, which is why so many small businesses were overlooked by sales teams.

According to Market Watch, the new cloud-based platform is available through the company website and in iPad app form, and it integrates with major CRMs. The application has been in development for three years, and aside from providing real-time data, the platform also makes available analysis and campaign performance data.

The Upside and the Downside

For small and midsize businesses, this means that their visibility to service providers using the application will greatly increase. Because of the ability to target specific demographics through the application, salespeople can find businesses in need of their products or services more easily. On the flip side, financial, time, and personnel constraints on many small and midsize businesses may mean that an increase in incoming sales calls may prove to be a nuisance.

Because smaller businesses have been largely overlooked by sales teams due to the difficulty in building and maintaining localized sales teams, small businesses are more accustomed to independently finding the services they need. There is therefore the possibility that the new data availability will not necessarily translate into increased sales. However, the Radius application's ability to find targeted leads may circumvent this somewhat by letting salespeople find relevant small business sales intelligence.

If the application is taken up widely by companies looking to service the small business market, there is liable to be a "teething period" where the increase in sales calls garners a negative reaction from some smaller firms. However, smaller businesses can also use the service to their advantage by advertising their need of a new service or product on a platform that Radius monitors and waiting for the salespeople to come to them.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.