Demandbase Sales Intelligence vs. Owler

While InsideView seems more comprehensive than LinkedIn SalesNavigator, when you're looking to identify and save contacts with a particular area of responsibility (IT, for instance), Navigator provides results and means to track them more quickly and easily. Having to "unselect" every other job area category when initially landing on a company overview page in InsideView is tedious and time-consuming.

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.

• 'Call Prep' - a list of industry-related questions to ask my prospects during the phone call to enhance trust and credibility as a business partner.
• Regularly scrubbed email and phone numbers of prospects. The verified direct-dial mobile number is GOLD. You may be able to get some of these elsewhere by paying extra with a separate standalone service. Having this integrated has improved my workflow, saving time from switching in and out of different apps.
• The family tree of organizations is particularly useful for targeting enterprise accounts that often come with convoluted company shareholding structures.
• 'Challenges' and 'Trends' - information to engage prospects during conversations.

• Owler enables the user to quickly find the data and information that he or she needs.
• I appreciate the customizable dashboard where you can set alerts and track companies you select.
• The latest news regarding the funding rounds of startup companies is especially helpful.
• The top competitors to companies provided by Owler often give me a great point of reference for my competitive analysis.

Incentivized

• As a system administrator, I wish I had access to real time reports regarding usage. Often times, senior leadership wants to know how their teams are using the information and who is using the software to its fullest. It's a pain to have to email InsideView and ask for a report.
• We are a global organization and there is not a lot of information regarding companies outside the US. I know they are working on this, but my global field reps are anxiously waiting to use the software too.
• I wish InsideView put out more "tips and tricks" documents. There does not seem to be a large repository of training documents. I am always looking to learn more, as are my reps.

• 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

Incentivized

Relatively inexpensive service for a decent current awareness service. They have added little in sales functionality in the past year as they focused on building a marketing version of the product. Except for the addition of broader European coverage last spring (thin Equifax records), the database was static over the past year.

Not really an applicable question as this is a free service, but if they charged $100 / year (GageIn's price) I would still license the service.

InsideView was extremely user-friendly. I was able to quickly understand how to efficiently use the software and get the most out of the service. I only had a short time to quickly learn how to use the functions offered by InsideView, and I felt confident within the first day of my understanding and ability to successfully use this tool.

I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography

Incentivized

Seems to always work.

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.

It's pretty fast.

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.

We had an intro session with a customer success rep and were given a rundown of the platform and it was absolutely perfect. The rep was able to show us advanced search options and shortcuts that cut our search time.

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

She was fine, but we only had one session

Seeing the demo during the sales cycle, not much training was needed due to this application being plug and play.

We had to work with InsideView for some custom configurations example we have a custom field in Salesforce called ha location that needed let's say NJ to spell out New Jersey and make certain fields mandatory. They were easy to work with though.

Incentivized

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.

In my previous company, I was using both Linkedin and ZoomInfo, both of them were good, but there was a lot of restrictions with the basic versions, and when we shifted to the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and ZoomInfo the quality improved but there was not much to get like InsideView. In my current company, at first we were using LinkedIn, but now I appreciate the decision made by our seniors to shift to InsideView. It is my personal opinion that I feel InsideView is better than LinkedIn and ZoomInfo.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Makes researching much easier so saved time prospecting.
• Cleaner information than other relative sites so not using bad information.
• Hard to put a number on saved time and then its dollar value in benefit, but it has definitely furthered my goals.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized