How long has Cortera been in Business?
How do I become a member of Cortera?
Do I have to pay to be a member of Cortera?
What kinds of subscriptions does Cortera offer?
What are the benefits of being a paid Cortera subscriber?
My business is not listed on www.cortera.com. How do I add my business?
What is the business problem that Cortera Lookalikes™ solves?
How does Cortera Lookalikes™ work?
How is Cortera Lookalikes™ different than other business data?
What are the measurable benefits of Cortera Lookalikes™?
What is a Cortera Payment Rating (CPR Report)?
Where does Cortera get the information that it uses to calculate the Cortera Payment Rating?
I disagree with the Cortera Payment Rating for my business. What should I do?
Where do the Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings come from?
When I rate another company, what should my ratings be based on?
Who submits Credit Exchange Ratings to Cortera?
How can I submit a payment rating?
What information about me can others see when I submit a payment rating?
Q. Who is Cortera?
A. Cortera is a leading business information and commercial credit solution provider that brings a fresh perspective to the challenges of getting timely, accurate and cost-effective insights into the financial behavior of businesses.
Q. How long has Cortera been in business?
A. Cortera has been monitoring business credit, assessing business credit risk, and providing services to the commercial credit industry since 1993. Originally founded as SR Research, and later as eCredit, Cortera has been helping large and small companies administer their trade credit programs through a number of innovative software and data solutions.
Q. Who uses Cortera?
A. Over 1,000 companies use Cortera services. Just a few of the companies that use Cortera are Xerox, NEC, Cisco, Cargill, Sun and Ryder.
Q. Why should I use Cortera?
A. Cortera brings unique perspective and fresh insights to the world of commercial credit, business information, and collective payment experiences. For over 100 years, the trade experiences of only a small segment of companies have driven the commercial credit scoring models. In today’s environment, as technology has revolutionized information sharing and online communities, Cortera is a leader in changing the way that businesses source and share information about the companies with which they do business. The new model is faster, more up to date, cheaper and more responsive than the old ways of sourcing data. Plus, it is a documented fact that companies that report their payment experiences with other businesses (i.e., their customers) tend to get paid faster than those that do not.
Q. How do I become a member of Cortera?
A. Becoming a member is easy and free. Join Now.
Q. Do I have to pay to be a member of Cortera?
A. Membership is free and gives you the ability to see payment scores and ratings reviews on businesses. Deeper information and more functionality are available to paid subscribers.
Q. What kinds of subscriptions does Cortera offer?
A. Free membership allows a user to view Payment Ratings and Community Ratings, as well as allowing a user to submit ratings on companies and provide updates about businesses. Paid subscriptions, such as Cortera Expert Subscriptions, are on a per-seat basis and allow for access to additional detail. Learn more.
Q. What are the benefits of being a paid Cortera subscriber?
A. Paid subscribers get more detailed information about the company they are researching, such as more detailed Payment Risk Summaries or more in-depth Cortera CPR Reports. Learn more about being a Cortera Subscriber.
Q. Where does Cortera get the business contact and demographic information contained on this website (business address and phone number, number of employees, estimated revenue, etc.)?
A. The business contact and demographic information is compiled from many sources, including public records, commercial data sources, submissions by Cortera members, and Cortera’s own research. We make it easy for you by compiling this data and making it easy to search.
Q. The contact or demographic information contained on the Cortera website is incorrect (business address and phone number, number of employees, estimated revenue, etc.). How do I correct it?
A. In order to submit an update, you will need to register and become a Cortera member (no purchase necessary). Your suggestions will be forwarded to our data quality team for review and verification. Accepted updates are normally published in approximately 10 days. Stay tuned, we’ll be adding real-time update functionality in the near future.
Q. I don’t like the fact that Cortera has information on its website about my business. How do I get Cortera to remove my business from its website?
A. It’s a misconception that certain information about your business is private. Information about your business abounds in a myriad of places, including public record sources. As a general rule, Cortera does not remove business profiles.
Cortera does give its members the ability to suggest updates to certain information contained in a business profile. You can submit corrections by clicking the “Update Profile” tab at the top of the company profile. In order to submit an update, you will need to register and become a Cortera member (no purchase necessary). Your suggestions will be forwarded to our data quality team for review and verification. Accepted updates are normally published in approximately 10 days. Stay tuned, we’ll be adding real-time update functionality in the near future.
Q. My business is not listed on www.cortera.com. How do I add my business?
A. Add business listings by joining Cortera as a registered user.
Q. What is lookalike targeting?
A. Lookalike targeting or finding prospective customers that look and act like your existing customers has been practiced and perfected by consumer marketers for decades.This practice involves capturing and analyzing a progression of your existing customers’ behaviors that define a behavioral model of how your current customers look and act. This behavior-profile is then used to search a databases for lookalike companies–prospective customers with a similar behavioral profile. Until recently, the development of behavior-based models and lookalike targeting was mostly limited to consumer marketing while B2B marketers focused mostly on less effective demographic data-based profiles.
A typical demographic profile use by B2B marketers would include SIC, NAICS, or industry; actual or modeled revenue; year founded number of employees; and geographic location. This information focused largely on what a company is not on how it behaves—what it buys, how it pays, where it invests, how it hires, public filings, material news and more.
Q. What is Cortera Lookalikes™?
A. Cortera Lookalikes™ is a web-based, intuitive, easy-to-use solution specifically designed to take the pain out of prospecting by delivering an efficient and automated way of figuring out exactly which companies to target—the ones with a high propensity to buy your products and services. Lookalikes enables you to evolve beyond basic demographic customer profiling to use business behavior– what companies buy, how they pay, how they invest, who they hire, public records, news, blogs, etc., to automatically develop Business Behavior Profiles to efficiently and effectively find prospects that not only look like, but also act like your current customers—the ones with a high propensity to buy your products and services.
With Lookalikes you’ll no longer need to sift through mountains of demographic profiles or chase vague opportunities down blind alleys. With Cortera Lookalikes™, you’ll have a sales and marketing GPS that provides turn-by-turn directions to companies that look and act like companies you’ve already sold to—your existing customers.
Download our new Lookalikes™ eBook to learn more about how you can use Lookalikes to finally figure out which companies to target.
Q. What is the business problem that Cortera Lookalikes™ solves?
A. Most sales and marketing professionals will agree that “prospecting sucks”–figuring out which companies to target is a challenge that has plagued B2B sales and marketing professionals for decades—it’s time consuming, inefficient, costly and ineffective. With all the advancements in B2B marketing technology, all the talk about ‘Big Data’, all the search, social and analytics tools we have at our disposal, you’d think it would be easier than ever to figure out which companies to target. Yet, it remains a major challenge for B2B sales and marketing. Cortera is maniacally focused on solving this business problem by automating the process of figuring out which companies to target—the ones with a high propensity to buy your products and services.
Q. How does Cortera Lookalikes™ work?
A. At Cortera, we believe understanding a company’s behavior is very important to understanding how it will likely behave in the future. That’s why we monitor the business behavior of 20 million US companies and track $1.6 billion in business-to-business purchases and capture and analyze a progression of your existing customers’ behaviors that define a Business Behavior Profile—a detailed model of how your current customers look and act. This behavior-profile is then used to search the Cortera database of 20 million companies for lookalike companies and delivers a list of prospects that look and act like your existing customers.
Once your Lookalike prospects are identified, you can us Cortera Data Boost to easily append additional information and insight to each Lookalike prospect and feed them directly into existing CRM, ERP and other systems. This helps increase marketing conversion rates and sales closure rates by providing the relevant, business behavior data and insights needed to more effectively and efficiently score, prioritize, target and nurture the right sales opportunities.
Watch a Lookalikes video demo and learn how you can quickly find prospect that look and act like your existing customers.
Q. How is Cortera Lookalikes™ different than other business data?
A. While most business data and information providers focus on providing demographic information and some are now providing social media data, Cortera Lookalikes uses both demographic and detailed business behavior data to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive “lookalike” prospects– companies that look and act like your customers—the ones with the highest propensity to buy your products.
Q. What are the measurable benefits of Cortera Lookalikes™?
A. Savvy B2B companies of various sizes across diverse industries are using Cortera Lookalikes to transform the way they market and sell. Companies are using Lookalikes to:
The quote below is great summary of the value of Cortera Lookalikes:
“Finding qualified leads has always been a challenge because of the limited data available on companies. We wasted a lot of time manually vetting lists through online research, profiling exercises focused on limited data and so on—only to come up with inaccurate and incomplete information about our prospective customers. Cortera is changing all that with Lookalikes— high quality leads that are based on business-behavior profiles of our existing customers and then automatically identified in Cortera’s own database. Targeting companies based on business behavior translates into faster, more targeted marketing and makes our sales reps 6 times more efficient.”
Aaron Bolshaw, Director of Marketing and Inside Sales, HA Advantage
Read our case study about how a national third party logistic provider used business behavior data to increase year-over-year revenue 10%.
Q. What is a Cortera Payment Rating (CPR Report)?
A. Using detailed payment data from thousand of regular data contributors, Cortera CPR Reports analyze overall speed of payment and recent trends in payment behavior. Then with an algorithm, Cortera assigns a risk indicator to over 19 million US businesses each month.
Q. Where does Cortera get the information that it uses to calculate the Cortera Payment Rating?
A. Thousands of businesses tell Cortera how their customers (a.k.a. other businesses) pay their bills on a monthly basis. In one month’s time, the total amount of trade A/R contributed exceeded $250 billion.
Q. I disagree with the Cortera Payment Rating for my business. What should I do?
A. If you disagree with the Cortera Payment Rating, send an email to dispute@cortera.com. Cortera will then send you a free copy of the CPR report pertaining to your business. If you identify the specific records that you wish to dispute, Cortera will contact the source of the disputed information and request that they verify its accuracy.
Q. What are the differences between the Cortera Payment Ratings and the Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings?
A. Cortera Payment Ratings are highly structured payment scores and represent what Cortera believes to be a refinement of similar commercial credit scores. These scores incorporate detailed submissions of trade receivables and apply a highly tuned set of algorithms to create a numeric indicator that describes the firm’s overall payment behavior based on the submitted data.
Think of Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings and reviews as a more “analytical” review combined with series of peer experiences. For example: On a car review site, you might see a professional review that attempts to rank the car across a specific number of variables (horsepower, fuel economy, braking distance, headroom trunk space etc.) as well as owner reports that discuss specific user experiences. Since Credit Exchange Ratings are submitted by other Cortera users, these types of reports will frequently represent a more timely and wider ranging set of experiences but are less detailed.
These two types of reviews complement each other and help form a bigger picture. They may mention many of the same elements but they provide a more complete view than one rating type by itself.
Q. Where do the Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings come from?
A. Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings reflect “point-in-time” experiences from a wide variety of Cortera members. These members may or may not formally contribute data to Cortera for creation of the Cortera Payment Rating. These ratings are less structured that the Cortera Payment Rating, but can provide more insight into specific experiences.
Q. What are the differences between the Cortera Payment Ratings and the Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings?
A. Cortera Payment Ratings are highly structured payment scores and represent what Cortera believes to be a refinement of similar commercial credit scores. These scores incorporate detailed submissions of trade receivables and apply a highly tuned set of algorithms to create a numeric indicator that describes the firm’s overall payment behavior based on the submitted data.
Think of Cortera Credit Exchange Ratings and reviews as a more “analytical” review combined with series of peer experiences. For example: On a car review site, you might see a professional review that attempts to rank the car across a specific number of variables (horsepower, fuel economy, braking distance, headroom trunk space etc.) as well as owner reports that discuss specific user experiences. Since Credit Exchange Ratings are submitted by other Cortera users, these types of reports will frequently represent a more timely and wider ranging set of experiences but are less detailed.
These two types of reviews complement each other and help form a bigger picture. They may mention many of the same elements but they provide a more complete view than one rating type by itself.
Q. When I rate another company, what should my ratings be based on?
A. Your ratings should be based on your past experiences with how a business paid you (e.g., whether you were you paid on time, late, or not at all). Cortera is not a consumer review website – we do not care about product reviews or whether you had a bad meal at a restaurant. Your ratings should tell others how businesses pay their bills.
Q. Who submits Credit Exchange Ratings to Cortera?
A. Any Cortera member can submit a rating on a company that they have extended credit or that owes them an outstanding balance. Registration is free, so start submitting reviews today.
Q. How can I submit a payment rating?
A. All you need to do is complete the free registration form and begin rating.
Q. Why should I submit ratings?
A. It is a documented fact that companies that report their payment experiences with other businesses (i.e., their customers) tend to get paid faster than those that do not.
Q. What information about me can others see when I submit a payment rating?
A. Your Cortera User ID will be displayed along with any ratings you submit.
"Cortera is one of the true innovators in our market. We've worked with them for years and I have only great things to say. Their new community approach to credit reporting is yet another example of their industry leadership."
"It is very gratifying when your VP of Finance comes out of his office to congratulate your team on their improved metrics. Our partnership with Cortera has really helped us to achieve these results."
