Item: D&B Hoovers
Rating: 9
Author: Caleb Dugger

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were looking to do several things in our Salesforce instance: Enhance customer data with firmographics (annual revenue, # of employees, industry, etc.) Validate data currently in the system Group customers by their corporate family Have a way to find new leads for the sales team We currently have the sales operations teams for the different business units using D&B Hoovers. They use it to validate the lead's information put in by the sales team. We also have a team uploading accounts to the D&B database to match and retrieve the firmographic information which then will be uploaded into Salesforce. It also helps with our hierarchy structure.

Pros and Cons

Appends firmographic information to accounts in Salesforce via an integrated service
Corporate hierarchy structures are the industry standard using the DUNS information
Providing a robust number of filters when searching the database to easily get to the information you are looking for

D&B Hoovers does not include the full D&B dataset and does not include out-of-business or non-marketable companies. As a result, if there was a match on the DUNS previously, but now the company is out-of-business, information can no longer be found in Hoovers.
Although the user interface was recently updated, certain elements are still not ideal like any custom views being created in the old UI not carrying over to the new UI and the inability to resize columns in grid views.
The search could be better when looking for companies based on the tradestyle name or being able to search by an address from the main search bar instead of having to put it in the filters

Return on Investment

With over 1 million companies, we were able to match over 70% of customers spanning globally
After matching and appending DUNS hierarchy information, we were able to create corporate structures so good in Salesforce they began being used across the entire organization
Adding the industry and annual revenue numbers gave us a good part of external information needed to be able to create an ideal customer profile then build out a segmentation model

Company Data

Knowing certain things about a company helps convert them from a lead into an account. D&B Hoovers provides most of that information. Hoovers provides the legal entity name, tradestyles (the doing business as name), website, address, annual sales, number of employees at the specific site and for the company overall, the industry (NAICS, SIC, and their own classification), phone number, the corporate hierarchy, if it is a franchise, if it is a manufacturer, if they import, if it is a headquarters, branch, or independent. And that's not even including all the information about the company like the business description, tax id, company history, products and operations, news about the company, competitors, and if they are public - the SEC filings.

Contact Data

Admittedly I have not used D&B Hoovers much for contacts, but have on a few occasions. They have gotten better in this regard, but do lag behind some competitors. They do provide the name and title of the individual as well as what site they are associated with. The function is also on there as well as any phone numbers and emails. You can also directly click on their social media profiles if available, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Alternatives Considered

ZoomInfo, Clearbit, Owler and DiscoverOrg (discontinued)

D&B Hoovers is the industry standard. To even apply for government contracts obtaining a DUNS number is required. With D&B's far reach with other products like credit, they have a very large database. Add that to the relationships they have with other service providers and it was clearly the most robust and accurate database for companies. Where it really excelled was the corporate hierarchies.

Key Insights

Do you think D&B Hoovers delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with D&B Hoovers's feature set?

Yes

Did D&B Hoovers live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of D&B Hoovers go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy D&B Hoovers again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Alteryx, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Excel

Likelihood to Recommend

D&B Hoovers is excellent for enhancing lead data in Salesforce before it is approved to become and account or rejected. It allows it to be put in the proper hierarchy and can check for duplicate values as well If you are looking for potential accounts in a certain territory in a specific industry where their annual revenue is between a threshold and want to know that the site is the parent, D&B Hoovers makes that search process very easy Speaking of searches, they allow for saving searches with certain parameters so it will always be up to date with the companies meeting the criteria and won't become stale If you want to be kept up to date on specific types of news like mergers and acquisitions for the companies in the saved search list, you can opt to receive only those types of notifications Since D&B Hoovers only contains the active and marketable records, it is not ideal for your entire database of customers if you know you have some that are no longer in business If you want to keep all your data up to date constantly (like weekly or monthly), other solutions would be better.

D&B Hoovers - the Tom Brady of sales intelligence platforms. Been around forever, and still the best.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with D&B Hoovers