What we do at MaconRaine is help companies find customers. We function as a "rep" and conduct selling activities on behalf of our clients. But before we can do any selling, we generally populate clients' CRM with accurate and up to date contact information. After all, it is hard to market to someone if you don't know who they are.
Having the right contact information makes it a little bit easier to get some time with potential prospects. You know the sales and marketing process; simply finding an excuse to get in the door is a round-about, adaptive, gradual and hybrid process.
To perform basic data hygiene and campaign targeting, we use all of the data services: Hoovers, Jigsaw, and a variety of value added list services. Some of the services are licensed (but seldom used) by our clients and some of the services we license directly.
We use JigSaw the most because we can get prospect email addresses. We don't spam. All of our email contact is one to one and extremely personalized.
Unfortunately with Jigsaw my major complaint is the inability to filter and remove unqualified prospects from my queries before I close out my list. When I've got to edit my search in the Shopping Cart it slows my workflow and can be incredibly frustrating. For example, I recently conducted a JigSaw search for VPs with keyword "Security" in the title. While reviewing the search results in the shopping cart, I noticed a number of contacts were actually responsible for physical security instead of network security. Removing those contacts was time consuming.
Recently, we were contacted by ZoomInfo's PR department, given a membership and asked to evaluate it on our blog. Since I love free stuff, here goes...
For sheer personalization what we like about ZoomInfo is the in-depth profiles kept on each individual. We can quickly research a prospect and craft custom outreach that references past press clippings or web-mentions. Zoominfo calls this capability "deep" data because it improves how we target and keep tabs on client competitive activity.
Zoominfo's lead sources are updated daily and, as I said, the service allows for powerful list segmentation. I can also upload key account lists to expand my baseline understanding of organizations in my clients' target market. This more than meets my criteria for a good prospecting application.
If forced to pick one of these services over another, I don't know if I would be able too. Each one of these services (ZoomInfo, JigSaw, etc.) does things slightly different and different projects require a different set of tools. In a best case scenario I'd recommend you buy them all, but the economy being what it is sometimes we have to make decisions. So for bulk prospecting I recommend Jigsaw. For surgical high level prospecting, Zoominfo is the way to go.
Which do you prefer and why?
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