Likelihood to Recommend I recently was asked by my boss to try to drum up some business with a certain 500 million annual revenue company. When I searched for Contacts, a list of over 800 employees popped up. I was able to filter by department, and this pared the list down To a much more manageable 15 names with associated contact information. I was then able to sort further and select the names of all the employees that had an email or phone number listed.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros allows you to search within broad industry categories or very detailed subcategories using a variety of methods (NAICS, SIC, D&B's internal coding system, keywords, etc.) Has a variety of personnel that you can view and sort by level, name, or email availability. Oftentimes emails for C-level personnel cannot be located on the company website or easily found elsewhere online. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons We should be able to "exclude" words from titles or company names Able to access titles and email addresses more easily - not look at list first, select find matching contacts button, then go back to sort to add titles contain and email addresses, etc. This is a two-step process to get what I need. Read full review 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 Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been D&B Hoovers customers for a long time. We know the good and bad, and we have learned to utilize D&B Hoovers for the good and unfortunately we have to look at other data sources to compensate for the areas where they are bad. If D&B Hoovers can get better in these other areas as mentioned in other places in the review, they could get a larger dollar spend from my company
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Because it's easy to use
Read full review 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
Read full review Reliability and Availability Always available on desktop or mobile.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance Meets our needs
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating They are terrific at giving instruction/webinars. I am able to call, directly, to an individual and talk to that person. I'm not talking to a robot. They give personal service which is really special.
Read full review Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.
Read full review Implementation Rating for our use case, the implementation was minimal and we did not need a lot of help. The D&B Hoovers platform is pretty intuitive and our account manager was ready for any questions that came up when we use the D&B Hoovers platform
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The company information provided by D & B hoovers is extremely in-depth and in detail, the accuracy of the information provided gives a very good idea about the prospective company and helps in making cohorts and evaluation fit. As compared to other companies D & B hoovers is not as efficient in detecting buyer intent which other tools like
Slintel are very good at. D & B Hoovers gives amazing company info however it can improve on sharing information about buyer intent. Sales Navigator by far provides extremely accurate information with is almost 100% accurate. However, Navigator does not provide buyer intent information.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability We're a small company with few users, so scalability has not been an issue.
Read full review Return on Investment Honestly cannot say we really drove any new sales using D&B Hoovers to prospect new companies and leads. We obtained higher data quality with other tools like ZoomInfo and Skrapp. A year long contract that isn't honored on their side due to lack of customer service and poor data quality definitely does not equal ROI. Spent significant time sanitizing and cleansing inaccurate data provided by their service. Since time is money in business, that was a loss in that aspect. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots