The Jig is Up. What’s behind Salesforce.com’s re-branding of Jigsaw to Data.com

Gary Halliwell, CEO NetProspex

• Read Write Web article about data.com
• Discussion on FOCUS.com

Along with 42,000 other people, I attended Dreamforce in San Francisco last week. It’s a staggering event, from the Jobs-like keynote by CEO Mark Benioff, to guest speakers like Google CEO, Eric Schmidt and even an appearance by Metallica at a private concert for thousands of Salesforce customers. 

Amidst all the hoopla, Salesforce surprised many with its announcement that it is rebranding Jigsaw to Data.com. Concurrently, the company announced a deal with Dun & Bradstreet to include its company data in the new Data.com product. 

What’s with the Jigsaw brand and why is Data.com better? What does a deal with Dun & Bradstreet mean? 

With attendance almost doubling each year, Salesforce’s momentum is testament to the company’s vision. By being first to market to harness cloud-computing with a platform business model in the CRM space, Salesforce has single-handedly fostered a bloom of innovation in business processes delivering significant value to thousands of nimble Salesforce customers in an area that really matters in these tough economic times - sales. 

Salesforce has considerably disrupted the CRM market by fundamentally shifting the innovation model in the CRM marketplace, taking it out of the imaginations of a couple of dozen product managers at Oracle or SAP and putting it into the hands of thousands of product managers and developers across Salesforce’s AppXchange ecosystem. This allows hundreds of partner companies to offer an array of sales tools and services to Salesforce customers.  

So what’s with the abandonment of the Jigsaw brand and the Dun & Bradstreet announcement? The answer to both is quality. The Jigsaw database continues to grow through its crowd-sourcing roots as B2B customers pool contact data, but we hear directly from partners and customers alike – and our own testing confirms - that the quality of the contact data continues to underwhelm.

The D&B partnership is focused around improving company data - something NetProspex did a good while ago to provide marketers with reliable company affiliation data. In other words, this partnership within data.com is much ado about nothing, beyond its deep integration into the Salesforce interface.

The quality of the Jigsaw contact information remains an issue.  The mechanism of sales people cleaning bad data just isn’t working because too many people game the system to gain points for free data. One adjustment to a contact record earns a point towards viewing another record. Besides, who wants their sales people cleaning someone else’s data? Crowd-sourcing business contacts clearly works in gathering data, but getting the crowd to clean the data is something NetProspex realized early on is not a viable solution. 

In the past couple of years, Salesforce has been busy building or acquiring various strategic assets in the areas of collaboration with Chatter, social media monitoring through its acquisition of Radian6, and crowd-sourced Jigsaw for integrated sales data. Clearly Salesforce is revolutionizing the sales desktop and this bump in the road with Jigsaw is something it needs to overcome. We believe we can help.

For Jigsaw customers in marketing who need to drive leads, NetProspex has solved the quality issue, maintaining our database of millions of contacts at a continual accuracy level suitable for marketing automation. Our process validates data as it is contributed by users with a three-dimensional approach to verification including email, social, and manual phone validation. By aging out old data automatically, we strive to improve the accuracy of each customer’s purchase. No customer is harmed in these processes, as we do not ask customers to correct data. So if you are a Jigsaw customer and need a cleaner source of data, or new verified contacts at a scale that suits your business, let us know.

Comments

[D8a_driven]

@Kyle, actually I recently interviewed a couple of dozen traders who have switched from Jigsaw to NetProspex specifically because of the royalty points system. They pointed out that the system creates an incentive for people to make minor updates to records (even adding or subtracting punctation) to claim royalty ownership of the record.

Sure, you can monitor that and take the record back but the traders I spoke to complained that they didn't have time to police this and defend their data from repeated attempts to "hijack" it. These guys are sending their data to NetProspex now specifically because they feel the credit system is "fairer." Several of them used that word specifically.

[JadedB]

It's interesting that you can respond to other's comments, but mine gets deleted because it questions your claim of being better than jigsaw by showing a clear example of how your service suffers from data problems as well but ultimately your data problems are harder to fix.

[JadedB]

If Netprospex is so much more superior to Jigsaw, why do I find contacts that are duplicated in your databse with multiple titles? For example, http://www.netprospex.com/people/KEITH-SHEETS/29605563 will show you that there are at least 3 listings for this contact with 3 different titles, which is incorrect.

Now if I were to find this in Jigsaw, I could simply report the duplicates through the update contact feature and the problem would be solved. With your service, solving the same problem becomes much more complicated.

How does that make my life easier and ensure the integrity of your data?

I'll stick with Jigsaw.

[Kyle O'Neill]

The Royalty points issue is the Achilles Heel of the NetProspex model and the main reason I have yet to consider making the switch.

With regard to Jigsaw...you take the good with the bad. Sure, sometimes you get incorrect and/or outdated info but in my experience that continues to easily be the exception vs. the rule.

Plain and simple, Jigsaw simply works and the ROI you get when it comes to the credit system is much higher in Jigsaw vs. NetProspex.

[Joe Zuccaro]

I think the rebranding to Data.com is a smart move in that there will probably be more than contact data from Jigsaw in the product offering, obviously with the Dun & Bradstreet deal and any future data vendor.

I don't think Gary has taken a "cheap shot" - he communicates a clear differentiation betweeen his offering and theirs. However, that comment is based on "now;" and I will wager that Gary knows that the bar is being raised and there will be more advances from Data.com in the days to come.

I look forward to NetProspex and Salesforce to both lead in this space and NetProspex's future commentary

[Markjfeldman]

The rebranding is just slight of hand. Nothing more. Salesforce.com came to the realization that they bought the brand (Jigsaw) with the worst quality in the space and are jettisoning the name in the hope that customers will reconsider the product with a few tweaks and under a new brand name.

[Craig Ferrara]

I'd have to respectfully disagree with the initial comment. Having run an inside sales team over the last 6 years I've gotten very particular about the lists I pull for my team and lately Jigsaw ain't cuttin' it.

When I first started using Jigsaw 5 years ago, I'd I have to admit I was a huge proponent of their service. To the point where the folks in my organization thought I was on Jigsaw's payroll. Over the last year I've seen the quality drop off dramatically.

Being the list geek that I am, a couple of months back I ran a search from Jigsaw and Netprospex using the same list criteria. I was surprised to see a 30% higher kickback rate from Jigsaw after we'd blasted both lists with a mass email. I knew their data was getting more and more suspect, but that big a difference was surprising to me.

As far as the interface is concerned, I don't see a big difference from Jigsaw's set up. To me they both seem user friendly.

Keep up the good work Netprospex! The quality of your data has made cold calling much easier for my team.

[Garrett]

Full disclosure: I use both Jigsaw and NetProspex. That being said. This does seem like a poorly formed argument and a bit of a cheap shot.

Hey Gary, why not institute Royalty Points - it's what makes Jigsaw the gift that keeps on giving.

[Tom]

It needs to be clarified that the contact data entered by all 2MM members of Jigsaw's community is rigorously monitored. Jigsaw currently adds 1MM contacts per month to it's database. This number represents 5% of the number of contributions Jigsaw actually receives per month. To that end, each community member is ranked (like Amazon reseller rankings). If a community member enters bogus data, they will be notified and their ranking goes down. If they do it three times, they are de-activated. SFDC buying Jigsaw was a brilliant move for the company. Partnering with D&B (the world's largest commercial database holder) for account data was another absolutely brilliant move. Having all of this new functionality inside SFDC should make it very difficult for someone to choose an inferior data source. At this point I fail to see any formidable competitor to data.com. This became very evident at Dreamforce.

[Michael Finegold]

If you were a disinterested 3rd party, your opinions might carry more weight. But it comes across as simply "dissing" a competitor.
I have used neither of your data services as almost all the leads for my team come from Google, so I am a 3rd party.