Overall Satisfaction with Data.com
I use data.com routinely, every few weeks at least, but at times every day for several weeks a month. As a freelancer, I often get employment building sales lists for clients, and this has been an indispensable resource for me. It's great to cross-reference with LinkedIn to ensure data quality and check for job title changes.
- Data.com is appealing because it's affordable. You might need to purchase a few contacts to get rolling, but once you're able to add some yourself and gain additional points, it can very rewarding to "earn" additional contacts by submitting some of your own.
- There is a wide range of search terms available to narrow down your list by name, region, company name, and others.
- Easy "add contacts" function, and a template to add a large number of them at once.
- Some contacts can be old. Perhaps they could consider validating some that are older than 5 years.
- They don't always detect duplicate companies. For example, I've added the same company twice before, I don't understand how they allow that, or prevent others from adding duplicates. It doesn't happen very often,, only occasionally.
- Sometimes data.com will "autocorrect" a job title incorrectly. For example, entering "Director of People & Culture" will autocorrect it to "Director of peopleandculture" If you don't catch it, it looks pretty bad for the next person who wants to view the contact.
- As a freelancer, I've made thousands of dollars building sales lists, for what began as a $50 trial.
- Cross referencing with LinkedIn helps to explain to clients the job title progression a person has had, which can add to your credibility and strengthen your report content.
- Data.com hasn't had a negative return for me. Every dollar and minute of effort I have used it was worth it.
- quickmail
I recently used quickmail for a client, it was awful. Software should actually perform its purpose. If you only have a few thousand contacts in a database, just provide the whole list. Using a search function where there aren't any results the last 15 searches, is worthless. I don't have that problem with data.com. I almost always get at least something with each search.