Item: Data.com (discontinued)
Rating: 10
Author: Robert Belton

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Data.com is a tool our research and prospecting teams use to gain and leverage business intelligence to aid in their efforts to help open up new business. Using the search features allows to narrow results down to our ideal customer profile targets, and focus on that marketplace. Without the features Data.com boasts, our research and prospecting time spent developing prospect lists and intelligence was exponentially more cumbersome.

Pros and Cons

Advanced searching - allows users to narrow down search results or target specific sectors based on parameters like revenue, subsidiaries, competition, industry, etc. Very detailed and specific background information is provided on organizations, and allows you to have a richer understanding of the prospect or client.
Customer service - they are quick and pleasant to deal with any time that we've ever had a question arise.
Salesforce integration - this software syncs records to salesforce with a few clicks of a button. It even allows you to clean your database and remove duplicates / append to existing records with their Clean function.

Multi-Location facilities - When searching for a prospect or account, you'll find that organizations with multiple locations (or worse, ones with 10+) all come back with the account name identical (Ex; "John Deere") and no easy way to identify them without manually changing the name yourself.

Return on Investment

Faster lead conversion
Increased employee efficiency - drastically cut down research time taken to identify accounts for our inside sales and business development teams to target.

Alternatives Considered

ZoomInfo, InsideView and joesdata

Data.com was very comparable to the other softwares our oganization uses, and we use it as an everyday tool because of how easy it is to work within salesforce. Our organization utilizes multiple platforms and competitors of Data.com, each for their own different reasons. The ease of which Data.com behaves in Salesforce sold us, and the advanced search features and tagging abilities (which cut down advanced research time and increases employee efficiency) made the decision much easier to justify as well.

Other Software Used

Adobe Photoshop, Box, Dropbox

Likelihood to Recommend

To build a strong prospect list and clean your database at the same, Data.com is unbeatable. Their advanced searching cuts down the time required to sift through accounts that don't meet your ideal customer profiles, and allows your resources to be more effective and productive overall. As an added bonus, the smooth integration to Salesforce will appeal to users of one of the larger CRM's, though; some may find the fact that organizations with multiple locations are hard to differentiate when importing them to your instance of salesforce without creating duplicates.

As far as data integrity is concerned, Data.com does a moderately good job of providing a healthy blend of senior and entry level employees, though you may find some of the information outdated. This can be annoying, but leveraging the available information the right way beats having nothing at all and being stonewalled by a gatekeeper.

Data.com - One stop Data shop!

Overall Satisfaction with Data.com