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.
$8.25
per month
Zoom
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Zoom helps consolidate communications and collaboration in the boardroom, classroom, operating room, and everywhere. Zoom is an intelligent collaboration platform that makes connecting easier, more immersive, and more dynamic. Zoom technology facilitates collaboration through solutions like Zoom Team Chat, Phone, Meetings, omnichannel cloud Contact Center, smart recordings, and Whiteboard.
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.
I think Zoom runs circles around Teams! I just wish starting meetings was easier - anyone with a link should be able to start the meeting the way you can in Teams. It would also be great to be able to see participants when you are sharing your screen.
I love how easy it is to set the focus on the presenter. It is annoying when people don't spotlight themselves as a presenter, so you get to see the whole gallery of attendees in smaller, two-inch windows.
I like the capability of having break-out rooms. Even though I don't use them very often, it is nice to have them available if the right situation presents itself for smaller group chats.
The recording quality is better than I have experienced with other products (Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc.), and the fact that it is already an MP4, so I don't have to convert it for publishing on our intranet is huge to me.
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
We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.
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
Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
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.
There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.
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.
Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.
As I've written before, Zoom makes us feel like we matter and that we're a client rather than a customer. They want us to succeed and they put in the time to make sure that we do. I feel like they're more of a business partner rather than simply a vendor or supplier. They spent a lot of time onboarding with us, giving us demos, helping us get set up, and then giving us follow-up to be sure it's going well.
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.
If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
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.
Zoom cannot be beaten for ubiquity - 100% of my clients and prospective clients are already familiar with Zoom. This is the #1 reason why I use Zoom. Additionally, Zoom integrates with AcuityScheduling, saving me a lot of time in creating meetings and adding them to the calendar. Zoom is disappointing in terms of video quality, interactivity features, and privacy. In cases where I need to use the recording of webinars for digital products, I will always use Crowdcast, and in cases where privacy is essential, I will use JitsiMeet.
The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.
Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.
Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.
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.
It enables me to send and receive messages from my team members during video calls, handling online presentations.
With the ability to quickly stop, mute, and even receive notifications when someone enters or exits the meeting room, I'm never obligated to show up while making a call.
It is possible to record online meetings for future reference and more effective customer service. As we dealt with a lockdown, Zoom helped our business run smoothly.
