Great tool for Sourcing Teams
January 17, 2018
Great tool for Sourcing Teams
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Oracle DataFox
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Sales
DataFox is solely being used by the M&A Sourcing team. It greatly helps in the mining effort for unearthing worthwhile companies by keywords and provides details on companies that are generally better than other tools (Owler, Hoover's, etc).
Pros
- Companies that fit a keyword. This is really valuable for M&A teams trying to flush out all companies related to a key phrase/market name. It will also give insight into other keywords that provide insight for how it compares to similar companies of that name.
- Probably one of its biggest claims to fame is that it is 'best in show' for providing $$$ figures of acquisitions. Many of these go unreported but DataFox, generally, will have this information. We have been able to verify this before with insight into prior acquisitions.
- Great User Interface - it is so easy & intuitive & new for a user to move around with, business user oriented, little time required to reach value.
- Export capability, particularly around a list companies for key phrases/specialties, is really easy to use.
Cons
- There is a significant price barrier with this product for many businesses and proving the use case/value will be a substantial difficulty for smaller departments. I do not know the exact figure nor was I the decision maker, but I was told the smallest deployment was around $10K/year.
- Improved/integrating more analytic features is possible & would greatly add value to many use cases.
- It provides a lot of high-level information on the vendor, but can expand this with RSS for news updates, better job enabling a comparison to similar competitive products, etc. It might seem like a 'well, duh' in much of the information but little things highlighting discrepancies in comparison to similar companies & where executives came from prior to their role (in a lot of these situations, they likely have the info stored but not the bandwidth/processes for that to be applied when moved to a new company).
- I don't have hard ROI numbers for it, but say the use case was using DataFox vs. googling everything yourself: I estimate that the average user would need to spend 1-2 hours assembling data points from: LinkedIn, company webpage/investor relations, press releases, etc & would likely only come up with 50-75% of the content available on DataFox that could have been on your page immediately in searching the company name.
- Take my example from above and keeping in mind the related keywords/specialties point I mentioned earlier (DataFox highlighting similar companies). I've been on projects where we: took a company/keywords we liked --> exported from DataFox 15-20+ columns of information on 400+ companies that we could then filter down manually or use filter options based on results that DataFox gave us. This process without DataFox is heartbreaking to think of - what me & a team of 4 others did in a week (~200 hours) to reach a clean C-level caliber report would have taken someone without DataFox easily 500+ hours & there is no telling that this individual would have been able to find all the companies that DataFox led us to.
- Best ROI is analyst time spend
- Hoover's
Apologies - there are a few others that are not coming to the top of my head aside Hoover's but I have experience with 4-5 similar tools. What makes DataFox stand out is its ability to group companies by keyword and insight into transactions.
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