Salesforce launched Data.com in 2011, in partnership with D&B, but has since decided to gradually sunset the platform. Data.com offered a store of company and customer data for use in sales and prospecting.
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Owler
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Owler is a sales intelligence app developed by the company of the same name San Mateo and acquired by Meltwater June 2021, providing competitive insights, company information, and other sales relevant information.
There are many scenarios that make data.com well suited, but most specifically, it works very well when looking for contacts within a certain zip code. You can sort and find information about these contacts and pay by points. This helps because you are able to pick and choose which you want to pay for.
This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.
Data.com is a great way to find out accurate revenue and employee numbers for companies across various industries.
Data.com's filtering capabilities allow our team to quickly find the ideal prospects to reach out to.
Data.com, being owned by Salesforce, allows for a seamless integration into our CRM. This saves us an incredible amount of time and ensures data accuracy.
Some contacts can be old. Perhaps they could consider validating some that are older than 5 years.
They don't always detect duplicate companies. For example, I've added the same company twice before, I don't understand how they allow that, or prevent others from adding duplicates. It doesn't happen very often,, only occasionally.
Sometimes data.com will "autocorrect" a job title incorrectly. For example, entering "Director of People & Culture" will autocorrect it to "Director of peopleandculture" If you don't catch it, it looks pretty bad for the next person who wants to view the contact.
The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information
Very intuitive to use and I've never had any confusion with features. Anyone can create an account and use the platform simply by adding a contact or company into the database to earn points. It's a great option if you don't have budget for lists or pay services. It is easy to use and anyone can benefit from it.
Owler's interface and user experience are streamlined and clean. It's easy to pick up on what the data visualizations are showing and other information provided in the dashboard
I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.
The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.
Whenever I've had a question their support has responded pretty quickly and gives me exactly what I am looking for. I have not had any technical issues so I can't speak to issues there, but as far as general questions from a free user they have impressed me with how quickly they get back to me and the thoroughness of their answers.
Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.
Adobe Workfront may not be the direct competitor of Data.com, but for the services I was using, Workfront looked a little better when it comes to the user interface. But Data.com definitely had more powerful features & better integration capabilities. Also, it was easier to play around with the customer journey in Data.com as compared to other tools I have used in the past.
I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.
The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.
