Item: D&B Hoovers
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use D&B Hoovers to do market research and build calling lists for both internally and for our clients. We use it to help identify target markets. We search businesses and find similar businesses to help identify clients target markets as well as for our own sales and marketing teams. We will also use it to look at specific types of other businesses in the same demographics, such as SIC code, NAICS code, Sales revenue or general metro or zip codes We also use it to look for contacts at the prospect businesses we are looking to target.

Pros and Cons

Main Business Phone and address
Business Classification
Overall majority of businesses captured in a market place

Contact Data - DL and Emails
Estimated Dated points - Sales Rev, number of employees, square footage
Contacts who work at company
Data on where that contact is located
intent data is not the best

Return on Investment

Market Research
Ability to understand if we can run a successful campaign for a client
Help identify new markets for internal sales team
Find additional prospects based on current customers Hoovers profile

Company Data

Overall it is pretty good, but the estimated data is all over the place. I have been watching a few companies for the past 5-6 years and none of the company data has been updated despite known growth at the company. I have brought up these examples to my direct contacts at Hoovers and nothing has changed. Just like with all data providers, you will see outdated info - but the companies are incentivized to have some outdated info or bad records since they are on a credit pricing model. This is not just a Hoovers issue, this is a all data providers issue that I've looked at

Contact Data

Ok at best - I dont try to use it b.c. there are a lot of better options out there and they price themselves like they are a leader. Over the past couple years, Hoovers has gotten better in this area, but they are still not a leader in this space. Last time I addressed this issue with my contact at Hoovers, they acknowledged this is an area of weakness they are working on.

Alternatives Considered

Apollo, Lead411, LeadIQ, ZoomInfo SalesOS and Seamless.AI

D&B is good at company info and data structure, all records have data (sic codes, industries, sales rev). Some of this data is correct some is not. For example, Sales Revenue for private companies can be extremely off and sometimes not updated for years. Also, Number of Employees can be extremely off and not updated for years. Overall SIC Code, NAICS Codes seem to be 80%ish accurate. The fact that all company records have SIC Codes, NAICS Codes, Industries, Sales Revenue is a very nice feature. A lot of other data companies have the industry info (SIC, NAICS codes), number of employees, and sales revenue missing from a larger percent of records. A lot of other data companies do not have as much of a robust company info as Hoovers does

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

ZoomInfo Sales, Seamless.AI, Linkedin Recruiter

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for a data provider with pretty good company profiles Hoovers is a great choice. They are currently NOT a leader in contact data. If you are looking for the best data provider for contact data, maybe not your best choice, but if you want to be able to be able to analyze all past clients or prospects to develop a "best fit" prospect profile, Hoovers could be a useful tool. If you are looking for a data provider to get direct phones, direct emails and every employee at a locations this is not the best option. Some of the other competitors who excel at contact data are lacking heavily in the company demographics, where Hoovers is does a good job.

Users and Roles

4 - The Operations and Data Team use D&B Hoovers. We use it for market research to help build calling and marketing lists for our sales and marketing teams. We also use it to build calling lists and do market research for calling campaigns for clients

Support Headcount Required

4 - The people who support D&B Hoovers and the people who are using D&B Hoovers. We run a lean org, so we do not have other people outside of the users who support D&B Hoovers on an on-going basis. The people who support D&B Hoovers are analytical and good an looking for similarities in companies to help with market research and to find prospective businesses. They are also critical thinkers when they need to find ways to use the platform to help accomplish their task if they are unable to with an initial simple search

Business Processes Supported

Market research
building calling list
helping determine market size based on market research outcomes

Innovative Uses

Use contact data to identify KDMs - Hoovers contact data is not the best
using keywords to find other businesses that match a market research profile, but industry info on the hoovers profile is not matching exactly to a basic search

Future Planned Uses

If contact data gets better, we would love to be able to utilize this feature
If intent data gets better, we would love to be able to utilize this feature

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.

Products Replaced

Yes - Sales Genie. Sales Genie had very old and outdated data. the UI was also very old. We switched to D&B Hoovers over 7 years ago, so it has been years since I've last looked at the data quality in Sales Genie and the UI. This could have all changed by the time of writing this review.

Key Differentiators

Ease of Use
Other

Data quality for company data. First and foremost from a marketing and sales standpoint, we wanted to ensure we were targeting the correct companies 70%ish of the time. Other companies at the time of purchase of D&B Hoovers did not have the company profiles and demographics as strong as D&B Hoovers.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

We would also rank contact data higher in the process. We are generally happy with how we use D&B Hoovers, but knowing there have been a lot of newer data providers in the market since we have purchased D&B Hoovers we may have taken more into consideration. Also intent data is something all data providers are touting now of days, but we have not have the chance to compare different data providers on intent data

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

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was minimal - We D&B Hoovers for a small team of people when we first purchased. So the change Management was extremely minimal. The only things we've had to do was when sending results of market research to other internal team members is explain differences in column headers and industry names / classifications. These are a couple downsides of using different databases is that industry names / labels do not match up since they are assigned as a data provider level.

Implementation Issues

mixing old and new data in the internal database

D&B Hoovers - 8+ Year User

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with D&B Hoovers