NetProspex - Blog

Skype Toolbar on NetProspex - Now We're Talking

Just downloaded the new Skype Toolbar which turns every phone number on my Internet Explorer screen to a clickable dial-up.  When we run NetProspex that means all 2.5 million phone numbers are now clickable.  What a great time-saver for sales with both email and phone now clickable directly from the NetProspex results screen.

Sales managers take note of the efficiency gains here.  Sales people don't have to wait to be fed by marketing and in fact they can take control in unearthing mid-management decision makers in seconds and even see a partial map of the company they are targeting to find alternate ways in.  Think how much time that saves...then they can quickly dial from their desktop.

Take a look

   

Accuracy from our Recent Phone Survey Looks Good at 73%

Every few months we run snap-shot phone surveys on our data to get a fix on the current accuracy of the database.  Accuracy is a big thing for us because it’s an important issue for customers.  Sometimes we offshore the surveys to third party companies, but this time we used our intern Sam to make the calls and find out how we are doing.  The results are as follows:

• 377 contacts were phone verified
• 138 contacts had left their companies or could not be traced with the information provided
• Overall accuracy 73%

Sam tells me that he sometimes has to dig to find people if using headquarters phone numbers and the person happens to be at a regional office, but that’s OK because that’s what a sales person would do anyway. The most important thing is to prove the contact be tracked down at the company give the information we provide.  It’s the end of our data update cycle right now and the data is due to be refreshed soon, so we would expect accuracy to increase by another few points.  We’ll report back in when we run another accuracy check with the new data in a few weeks.

NetProspex Achieves Great Results in First 6 Months

Now we have put June to bed, we can annonce that NetProspex acquired an astounding 160 paying customers in our first 6 months of operation. It's always uncertain starting up a new venture as you look to attract your first customers and we are obviously thrilled with the fact that sales have gone so well. 

Some of the bigger names include NetSuite, Gartner, BusinessObjects, Hitwise, Progress Software, JupiterMedia and Edgar Online. 

We look forward to the next six months with lots of exciting things in the pipeline that we will be revealing in the coming months

Over Viagra Calls

I'm a busy guy but I still don’t mind sales people who I don’t know contacting me by email or phone if they are have targeted me accurately, understand what our company does, what my role is and therefore have made an intelligent guess whether their product is relevant to my needs.  That is...they have already made some attempt to qualify me before making contact.

I'm talking about a business solicitation here, not being blasted about Viagra or some form of enlargement process.  No comment on my needs in these areas, suffice to say that those sorts of solicitations are annoying and potentially dangerous if fraudulent.

But with regular business solications, poorly targeted email or calls can still be annoying and time-wasting.  There’s lots of room for improvement in this area and that’s what our business NetProspex is ultimately all about.  We use technology to build in-depth accurate business directories, so that sales communciations can be more targeted and both sales people and business decision makers waste less time dealing with unqualified approaches.