Comparing List Building Tools: Data.com

Marketing and B2B Sales professionals depend on information (data). They use it to approach and engage the decision makers and other individuals who influence purchase decisions inside corporations they believe their company could potentially do business with. Many sources exist out there that buy, house, and sell this data, so the big $1 million question (literally) is:

Who has data accuracy and intelligence we need to get to the right buyers at the right time with the right message.

Let’s look at a big and highly-marketed company name like Salesforce’s Data.com. Information is crowd sourced, so users put in contacts to get contacts out. Does this mean I could put my 1995 Rolodex in and get new contacts. Well, in some sense, that’s exactly what it means.

Once you’ve read enough reviews around the internet, it’s clear that resources that aggregate data through data pools, web-crawling and crowd sourcing are unreliable at best. Most claim they have algorithms to weed out bad information by matching across multiple partner sources like Dun & Bradstreet, or they use signature scraping. Check out reviews on the internet to see what actual users claim. Don’t get me wrong, no resource can be perfect and this is not to disrespect crowd-sourced data gathering as this type of resource does have a place in the market.

Data.com’s offering includes:

• Targeting SMBs only
• Prefer mass emailing and hoping something bites
• You believe it costs less to staff up employees/researchers, and data check points to identify poor data, missed sales opportunities, and have time to fix the polluted information that you now own.

If your company has a targeted focus, you should consider more customized resources with great user reviews like Winmo – the sales intelligence database product introduced by veteran companies- The List Online and Advertising Database Express.

What makes Winmo unique:

• A sole focus on national corporations, brands, agencies, and non-profits that are proven to spend heavily in paid advertising and marketing (large marketing, marketing tech, media, and sponsorship budgets).
• Guaranteed accuracy with a human-verification model (true fact- each contact is human verified several times a year by a US-based researcher team and the emails are tested monthly).
• Partnerships with external supplementary data-providers companies like Pathmatics, Adforum, Kantar, Moat and StatSocial to give sales execs a complete picture of each company and their marketing and advertising strategies.
• Drill down from company to brand to agency relationships to see which decision makers influence business decisions for individual brands, corporations and agencies.
• Users can to create targeted lists – even by the most unique criteria like in-house media teams, online video spend, and social demographics.
• The daily delivery of actionable prospecting content, from researchers tracking corporate changes and vetting new sales opportunities across marketing, media, and advertising.
• The tracking and confirmation of relationships companies have with outside agencies which support marketing and advertising purchases.

If you could add 20 mins into one salespersons day by making a $4k investment, and realize a return of more than $90,0000, wouldn’t you?

And don't just take our word for it, check out what users just like you say on G2Crowd.

The actual math behind poor data partners choices:

The price point of a resource has virtually no relevance to the cost of choosing a partner.

After all, the difference in spending $8,000 rather than $4,000, set against revenues of $2.5 million versus $2 million is a ROI no brainer, right?

Often times the budget holders, whether it’s a CRO or CEO, do not take into consideration that “saving” $4,000 could carry a missed revenues cost $500,000 or more over 12 months. To be fair, unless they have experienced the time savings and measured the year-on-year increase in revenue by choosing a premium resource, the $4,000 price difference can be a hard pill to swallow.

One way to measure is to look at the cost of a sales or marketing persons time. Every hour that your sales reps spend in non-revenue-generating activities like researching contact list, you’re incurring two costs. First the hourly cost of your rep, second the lost revenue that rep could have realized if he/she was working a prospect instead of a database.

Let’s look at a sales rep earning $100k per year, and generating $500k in revenues.

If they spend one hour of an 8-hour day in non-revenue-generating activities, all their revenue is generated in the remaining 7 hours. Taking out weekends, a couple weeks of vacation and federal holidays, your rep works about 240 days each year– or 1,920 hours, split 1,680 selling hours and 240 non-revenue-generating hours per year.

Those non-revenue-generating hours carry a salary cost of $52.08 ($100,000/1920 hours) per hour.

But wait! Maybe we should actually consider the sales persons production in sales revenues since salary is an expense and revenues are what pays the company’s bills. Those hours carry a lost revenue cost of $297.62 ($500,000/1,680) for every hour spent doing something other than selling.

That’s $379.70 every day for 240 days each year. Or a total cost of $91,128.

That is a scary number. So where is the breakeven point to make that $4000 price savings back up?

Answer: Let’s just say that $91,000 works out at about an extra $338 in new revenue every day. So that $4,000 will pay for itself before the NFL Conference Championship games are played, or in about 20 minutes of labor cost every day.