RSM Success Story

In its simplest form, information and data help us make sense of everything. Take something broad like the metaverse. Not only is it poorly defined, but people are afraid of the technology involved because it changes how they need to think and how they operate. Data helps us connect certain dots, taking a macro vision of what the metaverse could become and translating that intelligence for people so they can develop tools today to help them prepare for tomorrow.

But we can only help people take the best action if we have the best intelligence. 

Keeping on Top of Trends 

RSM is an audit, tax, and consulting firm serving middle-market businesses in the automotive, finance, energy, food and energy, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, and government sectors, to name a few. Our expert advisors help our customers navigate the changing landscape in their respective industries and guide them in understanding the emerging technologies that will transform the way they work.

I lead the Acceleration Center for Innovation Research Lab, Andrew Murphy is RSM’s Innovation Research Manager, and Grant Stellmacher is the Senior Research Analyst. Our combined expertise helps guide the lab’s activities as we bring together people who previously worked in silos for different stakeholders within RSM.

Our research community was previously comprised of disparate individuals and used various tools on an ad hoc basis, including the occasional use of CB Insights. When we launched the lab and brought together all of these research capabilities, we needed a way to cover many different areas thoroughly and quickly. We decided to incorporate CB Insights into the lab’s official set of tools as an all-in-one platform to help us stay on top of multiple industries. We became subscribers and gained access to the platform’s advanced features, such as Analyst Briefings, ESPs and Mosaic Score. It was well worth the extra investment, as we now use CB Insights daily to generate actionable business intelligence for our internal teams and customers.

CB Insights helps RSM stay on top of trends by going through the Daily Digest to see funding activity. Going back to the metaverse example, we use the Daily Digest to look for spikes in investments related to the metaverse. It’s a $50 billion business—more than the NFL, MLB, and the PGA combined—but many people aren’t paying attention because the technology is not always so visible. By tracking funding investments, we can see what’s happening under the radar and surface that action to our teams.

We can create customized homepages within CB Insights that focus on specific technologies and industries to quickly get a complete picture of areas that interest us most. We receive notifications of any new reports from CB Insights, and we use the Analyst Briefings tab to flag startups of interest and get an overview that guides our next steps. It’s a lot of information, but it takes less than five minutes to gather enough data about a company to start the conversation, “Where do we go from here?”

Fielding Complex Requests 

The Innovation Research Lab fields a lot of requests. Some are very straightforward, but sometimes, questions that seem simple on the surface require our researchers to dive into specifics and generate extremely granular results. 

CB Insights lets us cut through the noise and collate the most pertinent data to answer the questions being posed. —Zackery Reichenbach-Carr, Leader, Acceleration Center for Innovation Research Lab, RSM US

Recently, a client engagement team approached the research lab about a customer-facing collaboration tool. They had already found a potential solution, but the chosen platform wasn’t up to par. Starting with that product as a benchmark, our analysts used CB Insights’ Collections to build a list of competitors in the space, complete with company profiles and links to external data. 

We presented a correlation matrix that mapped 40 companies to that team’s needs, giving them plenty of raw material for further market analyses and product comparisons. We found so many options where they’d only seen one, and that’s the power of CB Insights. It provides a 360-degree overview of cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, emerging, and established players within a targeted sector. We could spend days poring through search engine results or asking colleagues for references and recommendations, but CB Insights is a single window into the startup space that generates results within minutes.

Framing and Contextualizing Research Results 

With so much data at our fingertips, it can be challenging to fine-tune our research output and translate it into useful information, and that’s the only way to have a meaningful impact. Using CB Insights, Grant, Andrew, and I have become subject matter experts in various fields and technologies. We pool our expertise to help our RSM’s internal teams and customers and share each other’s feeds to combine our knowledge when answering people’s questions. 

We first tailor our results to match where a team or customer is on the technology adoption curve. Once we’ve compiled our research results, we use the Mosaic Score feature in CB Insights to shortlist companies of interest. The Mosaic Score aggregates hundreds of data points and compares a company to other startups in its space to evaluate its current health and predict its future success. These findings are a good barometer of whether to partner with or invest in a startup and provide a way to explain why a company is a solid choice.

Information and data are really our lifeline. Not only do we need the highest-quality data to tie together different complex thoughts and ideas that we’re conglomerating throughout our daily operations, but we need to be able to cut through the noise of everything that’s being published, and CB Insights has allowed us to do so. —Grant Stellmacher, Senior Research Analyst, Acceleration Center for Innovation Research Lab, RSM US

Next, we synthesize quantitative and qualitative data to tell a story of what we’ve found. We use CB Insights’ Market Maps to synthesize information about a given technology or sector. We can say, “Here’s our hypothesis,” and back it up or challenge our preconceptions because CB Insights has already mapped the 70 most influential companies in that field, such as healthcare or home automation. These maps are a starting point for further conversations and a launchpad for our research efforts. Knowing the lay of the land allows us to guide people in understanding research results.

Framing is everything, and creating a cohesive narrative helps people think about complex concepts, especially in emerging technologies and industries. We then offer a list of immediate action items to make those concepts more concrete and propel everyone forward.

Breathing New Life into Data and Innovation 

CB Insights has allowed us to breathe new life into data and to leverage existing partnerships with other research firms, startup communities, incubators, and investors. These relationships are great if you know what you’re looking for at the macro level, but it’s hard to find sector-wide trend analyses focused on funding and companies rising to the top. CB Insights is now where we start, and after we have the insights we need, we can turn to other sources for backup information.

CB Insights is the Innovation Research Lab’s primary tool for establishing a detailed picture of an industry or sector. —Andrew Murphy, Research Manager, Acceleration Center for Innovation Research Lab, RSM US

Innovation is all around us, but with so many startups and emerging technologies to explore, everything becomes noise, and it’s easy to lose focus. CB Insights helps our researchers monitor the latest developments and keep an eye on trends so we don’t miss the next big thing—and convey the trends to others. As the fifth largest Accounting firm in the US, RSM has a responsibility to our clients, partnerships and talent globally across dozens of industries; CB Insights provides the business intelligence we need to support that ecosystem, maintain relevance and continue to innovate.