Item: D&B Hoovers
Rating: 9
Author: Yee Yek

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Primarily by the growth and marketing team to find companies that would fit our TAM and more specifically and importantly, our SAM. Functionally usage spans from operations, to analytics, to engineering across the growth and marketing teams.

Pros and Cons

Identifying SMB -- I think this is very important for us as well as other non b2b-companies.
Providing detailed data about companies
Smart search engine -- able to type in related-names and it brings up the company I'm lookin for/

UI is very dated, feels early 2010's
No "suggest a change" functionality
Would like to see it branch into other firmographics

Return on Investment

Extracting value out of data that just seemed too bad to actually do anything with
Expanding the TAM/SAM that is actually contained within our database

Alternatives Considered

ZoomInfo

It's just more granular. It's good for very specific company data that other platforms don't have that level of specificity. To that end, I think they're very good at what they do compared to other tools like ZoomInfo.

Compared to ZoomInfo though, you kind of want to see D&B to now expand their techno/firmographic offerings to better match ZI -- even though the latter is less specirfic on a lot of things, it's breadth of coverage really makes it feel like you need both, which can be expensive.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy D&B Hoovers again?

Yes

Other Software Used

ZoomInfo, D&B Optimizer (formerly NetProspex)

Likelihood to Recommend

Enriched a significant amount of account data where there was very little to start with -- really helps you extract value from your data and find gaps you didn't even know was there. Also allows ongoing data management to ensure that you don't keep building gaps over time -- you only need to educate people on how to use it and assuming you have seats you can just standardize the research and creation of accounts.

Great at doing what it does, but could be better if they broadened their data

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with D&B Hoovers (formerly Avention)