NetProspex - Blog

NetProspex Closes Record Second Quarter and Achieves Breakeven Growth Driven by Acceleration of User Contributed Data

 

 

 

WALTHAM, Mass. – July 9^th, 2009  

 

NetProspex, which has built the fastest growing user-generated directory of business contacts that allows sales and marketing executives to generate cost-effective leads, recently closed its strongest quarter in the company’s two and a half year history. Driven by a 6-fold increase in website traffic in the past year, NetProspex’ revenues increased 100 percent over the same period. In addition, the company received over 15 million business contacts added by users. 

With the easy to use business contact recycling system, users can trade old business contacts for new targeted prospects that have been scrubbed by NetProspex’ proprietary CleneStep^TM trade processing technologies. As a result, the company achieved its first cash-flow break-even quarter.

NetProspex is designed to enable sales and marketing executives to quickly and easily find highly accurate contact information about business people and organizations. NetProspex’ mission is to create the largest, most accurate directory of business people available, making it easy to find decision-makers across all industries.

Gary Halliwell, founder and CEO of NetProspex, says

“Our growth, despite these economic headwinds is a testament to the solid prospects of a business model that takes a useless by-product of the sales process – old sales leads – and turns them into new opportunities. We’re the only business contact directory with the technology to clean user-contributed data and provide a comprehensive resource of accurate, up-to-date business contact information.  Customers who try NetProspex see immediate ROI in the form of new sales opportunities in the pipeline.”

About NetProspex

NetProspex was founded in 2006 by Gary Halliwell and Jeff Clewley, two veterans of the electronic financial information market. NetProspex understands that effective sales efforts require the most in-depth and accurate prospect data. The company's core product line overlays user-contributed contact information with multiple layers of quality control to produce an entirely unique and highly effective sales and marketing contact database. With over 7 million accurate business contacts across almost 600,000 companies, NetProspex is a major new source of contacts - including difficult-to-find mid-management decision makers across North American businesses. For more information or a free membership, visit www.netprospex.com.

 

 

 

NetProspex Community Votes a Big "Yes" by Submitting 10 Million Records!

We announced in a press release today that our business contact trading system processed a staggering 10 million contacts already in 2009.  Using our CleneStepTM technologies, we selected in excess of 2 million of these for publishing in the NetProspex Directory which now brings the database to 7 million business contacts.  

Despite the economy, NetProspex is expanding on all fronts with large growth in online traffic as sales and marketing executives find NetProspex a great place to find new leads.  Because users can trade old contacts for new, this recycling of old sales leads provides a great way to find new sales opportunities while lowering costs, which is just what is needed when sales and marketing have to do more with less.

November - Record Sales Month

We are thrilled to announce that our one year anniversary in November was marked by a record sales month.

New enterprise customers added include Citrix, Sunlife, CapitalIQ, Double Positive, Casewise, Upper Deck and Global Insights.

NetProspex Releases Company List Match

Users can now upload custom company lists to find contacts

NetProspex today announced the release of its new company match feature.  Users can now search for contacts against their own custom list of companies in a matter of seconds. "We are always listening to customers to find out what improvements we can make" says Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex.  "This is a great tool for customers who want to create an updated contact list for a specific set of target companies" adds Halliwell.

The NetProspex search form now allows users to upload a CSV file of up to 5,000 company website url's  and to search for any job title or function against this list.  This will prove useful to customers who have an existing prospect or customer database who want to find new contacts or update existing contact lists.  NetProspex has been using the tool internally for some months to service customer requests and the demand from customers to upload lists on a self-serve basis has resulted in the tool now being released to all users.

A Hot Month in August for NetProspex Sales

In what is traditionally a quiet time of the year, August has surprisingly strong for NetProspex sales with more than 40 new corporate accounts signed.  A leading player in the charitable foundation management space added a subscription following an intitial trial purchase and provided very positive feedback on accuracy and ROI they have experienced.  The leader in web conferencing software signed a deal for multiple seats.  In addition, one of the top technology conference organizers added their third list purchase to promote their latest up-coming events.

In launching this business late last year, our hunch was that depth of coverage, transparency and data accuracy and would be important USPs. We believed that these differntiators would resonate in a crowded market of static directories or list brokers with too few controls on data quality.  Our customer acquisition to-date seems to bear this out.

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