Warning: This post is one of those Jigsaw promoting articles that fulfill my responsibility to marketing (remember they do all the heavy lifting for Garth’s World) to occasionally push product. I will use several nauseatingly popular expressions and (attempt to) avoid overtly ragging on any Jigsaw executives, internal processes or partners- which I think makes this drivel worth reading most weeks.
Shortly after we founded Jigsaw, a sales guy friend of mine who had started and sold his own data company told me that “how seamlessly you deliver the data to your customers is as important, if not more important, than the quality of the actual data.” Since my perspective on business information at the time was solely that of a sales guy, I of course dismissed this statement as the typical ramblings of a first time entrepreneur traumatized by the tech melt down. If a lead came to me with an incorrect phone number or email, there wasn’t a pretty enough application, spreadsheet or marketing intern in the world that made the contact profile worth the time I spent following up on it. Well, six years and countless customer meetings later, I now know that:
a) The enterprise data customer isn’t a sales guy
b) My friend nailed it
This is why I am particularly happy with Jigsaw’s latest data-as-a-service offering, called Data Fusion.
When our offering was limited to a team subscription to Jigsaw.com for salespeople or a list purchase for marketing, our sales guys used to have to break into advanced hieroglyphics and hand shadow puppetry in order to translate our value to the enterprise data decision makers (who again are not marketers or salespeople). It was as if we were Antwerp diamond wholesalers trying to sell engagement jewelry directly to Chase and Buffy in Peoria. Yeah, we had the big diamonds for great prices, but we didn’t understand how to deliver them on a ring- and we were speaking Belgian (or Stella-clog windmill or whatever).
Now, with Data Fusion, everything is so easy for the owner of the CRM or prospect database. Jigsaw takes all your crappy, incomplete data and keeps it up-to-date with nightly downloads from all the thousands of refreshes we get from our Community of almost 900,000 members. Data Fusion also comes with Unlimited prospecting licenses for your sales people- so they never have to rent from the sad-sack rental lists, crawl the web or play the Admin shuffle cold caller game. Best of all, this whole process is automated through your Salesforce.com (with our new Open API soon to be “CRM company X”) system- no buying software, procuring data, learning new systems, or trying to teach your sales guys anything. And- it’s priced per license, per month- so even (like everything else Jigsaw) SMB’s can take advantage of the goodness.
Data in the cloud- it’s like diamonds in the sky.
Garth
PS- Data Dinosaurs- you know who you are- “welcome to the jungle, baby- you’re gonna die!!!!
