Item: D&B Hoovers
Rating: 10
Author: Perry Ross

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use D&B Hoovers to find Phone and email address contacts within companies in industries that our one/stop production shop can serve. D&B Hoovers offers company profile information including employee head count and annual revenue which helps me stratify which prospects have the most promise.

Our sales team is the primary user of D&B Hoovers.

Pros and Cons

Easy to filter a list of hundreds of contacts to pair it down to just a few key people in either purchasing or engineering departments.
Searching for a company by their web domain instantly brings up the profile.
Once I have identified a company I wish to speak with, I can also see corporate linkage to other satellite offices or divisions under the corporate umbrella.

Sometimes the contact information provided is quite out of date. For example, I will call a cell phone number of a person listed in the database and find that that person either has never worked for the company in question or they left years ago.
Occasionally a company comes up on the list but the company is permanently closed.

Return on Investment

D&B Hoovers allows me to make the most of my time when searching for companies within specific industries. Once I find a company and examine their profile, I can then generate a list of employees in the purchasing and engineering departments. The profiles for each listed employee contain cell phone, Email address and LinkedIn profile. This information helps me to bypass the companies front desk and get directly to the people I need to speak with.
By knowing the specific job title for the people that I am contacting and then being able to click on their LinkedIn link to learn a little about them before I make the call, I come across as a sales professional instead of an impersonal cold-caller.
In cases where I do need to go through a front desk receptionist whose primary mission is to screen out sales people, I find that three out of four times the receptionist will connect me to the specific employee because I know their name, department, and job title. The Intel provided by D&B Hoovers makes it possible for me to get to the people I need to speak with.

Company Data

There is much more data than I usually need listed in the company profile. I mainly look at the employee headcount and also the annual revenue to give me a rough idea of the company size. This helps me weed out tiny companies where the return on my time investment would likely be minimal. The most effective way to find companies seems to be searching for them by their website domain name. If that fails, I can usually put in the company name and city and find a listing.

Contact Data

The data is rich, albeit sometimes out of date. In some cases I come to learn that the employee I’m looking for retired or left years ago. I have recently discovered that the LinkedIn profile link can further help me determine whether the person I am seeking is still in the position that is listed in D&B Hoovers. If the person has moved on to a new company, LinkedIn can help me find where they have gone and then I can search for the new company in D&B Hoovers and reach the person in their new role.

Alternatives Considered

ZoomInfo Sales

I feel like the D&B Hoovers company profile information is more accurate, whereas ZoomInfo has somewhat inflated numbers for annual revenues or employee headcount. When I compared the two companies a few years ago, the D&B Hoovers platform subscription was a bit higher annually than zoom, but I’ve always felt that you get what you pay for. I’m willing to pay more for accurate information.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of D&B Hoovers go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy D&B Hoovers again?

Yes

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.

D&B Hoovers helps me quickly find and connect with key contacts!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with D&B Hoovers