AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, their AI-based technology has helped professionals make business decisions by delivering insights from public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. The platform boasts users among 4,000 enterprise customers. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and…
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DiscoverOrg (discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
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Capabilities of the former DiscoverOrg product are now supplied by ZoomInfo, since the merger of DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo into a single brand in 2019.
AlphaSense is the best overall Ml/CI solution I've ever used. The tool has far surpassed the capabilities I used in the past (tools like Nexis and Factiva) and offers unique content and better usability. I have found some gaps that require incremental subscriptions to complementary tools (HG Insights, Crunchbase, Crayon, etc.). Still, I believe these capabilities could be added through acquisition or further product development.
Uses [of DiscoverOrg] include searching for prospects in accounts. Getting all of the relevant contact information in one place. Using the export button saves time by allowing you to select one or more leads to import into CRM. Sophisticated search allows for you to build lists, and export as above. Good support with various experts available to help you get started and get better at using it.
Prospecting Lists/Lead Gen - Discover Org does this very well because of it's ability to provide current information (email/phone) on an individual at a company. It's easy to segment & drill down by categories - to find the right targets to reach out to.
Insights - DiscoverOrg is great at providing insights or "scopes" on prospects as well. Meaning it will show who is handling what project (Decision-Maker) and what projects they are particularly interested in at the moment/what initiatives. For example, the scopes may show that they are interested in AI initiatives or a Merger & Acquisition or Digital Transformation & will say who is in charge of the initiative.
Stellar filtering capabilities - you can filter lists in so many ways. You can go by function, or even look at companies with small marketing teams (let's say less than 10), or you can search for companies with an "x" amount of $ budget for IT spend. Or even companies that use a specific HR workplace management system.
Improvement on the search capabilities - since there is so much to search (which is a plus) it makes it harder to do this in a timely manner. You have to dedicate a certain amount of time to be able to pull a proper, useful and clean list.
Make it more user friendly - there are so many different tabs, search buttons, pull down, etc. I think it can be quite confusing to a new user.
AlphaSense is a very useful tool and is reasonably priced for our organization. While I may not be a hyper-active user, it's a great resource when I need to quickly do a competitive landscape survey, review publicly available documents (transcripts, etc.), or review Wall Street research
The tool is simply better than most other lead/company data repositories, and they are dedicated to keeping their data clean, even if they are far from accomplishing this task at present. The tool works, and it is relatively easy to use. Overall, DiscoverOrg provides the level of lead/contact, customer, and even industry level data the sales orgs have come to expect from this sort of tool in a format that is fairly easy to use. They do also provide support for sales teams looking to use the tool effectively, which is great!
Alphasense is very user-friendly, and the team also does a great job of getting users set up before they are officially left to explore the platform on their own. While I have the added advantage of coming from a background that uses many of the same techniques to search for data, the prompts available and AI incorporated provide the needed direction to identify the information you are looking for without the experience I speak of.
The availability of Alphasense is great. I have used the software for multiple years and cannot remember ever having an outage issue. This is surprising actually, as I use other software applications that do not have regular outages, but still have outages periodically. Alphasense, on the other hand, never seems to have any outages. Good sign if I can't remember the software not working :).
Loading or performing searches on AlphaSense platform is reasonably fast for most of the time. However, it is sometimes unacceptably long for me to load PDF files (earnings presentation, supplementary financial report) on AlphaSense. Certain features might also take very long time, such as loading for "similar tables" across EDGAR filings, or downloading tables from EDGAR filings
Customer support is very prompt. I get personalized support for search recommendations and content that I could not find in my own search. Support checks in with me on a bi-monthly basis to keep me informed of the many different feature additions, I cannot find a more kind, understanding, and supportive team.
The person was prepared, attentive, understood the nature of my questions, was willing to work through any difficulties or misunderstandings, was patient, and super pleasant to work with. Great customer service.
Trainers address the basics, and such training was meant for new users. Instructions are really helpful by providing scenarios that our team will face in our daily tasks. It will be more thoughtful if the training is conducted by case studies so as to allow new users to get first-hand experience during the training.
Nothing else had the platform capabilities nor the level of access to information that AlphaSense does. Everything else I tried had one area or type of information it aggregated, but none of them were able to integrate information the way AlphaSense does, and most of them didn't really enable access to news, so I had to supplement my work with RSS feeds and dozens of open browser tabs. AlphaSense collapsed all of that effort into one search in one window.
ZoomInfo acquired DiscoverOrg and I believe legacy DiscoverOrg will phase out in the near future. ZoomInfo is 100x better than DiscoverOrg and are very pleased with it's functionality and easy of use. We only selected DiscoverOrg because we were on an auto-renewal contract and did not unsubscribe in time. We did not plan to renew DiscoverOrg. But since then we have been upgraded to ZoomInfo and are finding much more value in that platform than we did in DiscoverOrg.
The sharing features provides by AlphaSense mean that it can be readily scaled for teams within an organization and, subject to compliance requirements, with client organizations. The ability to share annotations of transcripts and investor releases is valuable, and facilitates collaboration between analysts.
AlphaSense has allowed us to generate deeper competitive insights. For example, we conducted an in depth analysis of the aerial data analytics (drone) industry, and AlphSense helped us narrow in on the market leaders and their various strengths / weaknesses.
AlphaSense has improved our team's overall efficiency. With Stream in particular, we are able to pinpoint insights in a matter of minutes through the transcript feature as opposed to having to conduct a series of calls ourselves. This is a significant time saver.
AlphaSense has allowed us to make more informed decisions on our public holdings by providing us with unfettered access to equity research analyst reports.
After using DiscoverOrg, our lead are now well qualified and suitable. We are able to generate good and qualified. This is the positive impact.
After using DiscoverOrg, our sales team is now able to cold call the target contacts, the number provided by DiscoverOrg, the interaction held is now increased and we are able to produce good leads.
After using DiscoverOrg, we are able to understand better because of their reports and dashboards which is very informative.
