For those unfamiliar with Jigsaw, they’ve built a prospecting database using a simple premise: sales reps could enter “business card info” for their prospects and clients, accessing one free record for each they uploaded. While no sales reps will give away their “Glengarry leads”, Jigsaw understood that one sales reps trash was another’s treasure, and reps would gladly share info on non-active prospects in return for new leads.
Jigsaw has transformed the industry in a few ways.
First, and most obvious, is the use of a crowdsourcing model for data maintenance. The crowdsourcing model is compelling for several reasons:
- Cost structure is low, as you push the cost of maintenance to your users. In Jigsaw’s case, they developed a thriving community who would actively source and update contacts in the Jigsaw database in return for free access to the service. Over time, Jigsaw found that by providing a “leaderboard” of the most active in the community and a marketplace for selling the points acquired by cleaning data, a subset of these users were updating thousands of records.
- Scale and reach go beyond what any traditional data collection process could provide. Today, Jigsaw has more than 46,000 people at Deloitte LLP, for example. Traditional people databases might capture 50 or 100 or maybe 500 executives at a firm like Deloitte. But they’d never be able to navigate the structure of a firm that large to amass that number of contacts.
- Maintenance is the greatest challenge for people databases. It’s easy to aggregate a bunch of names and titles, but once you go beyond the C-Suite, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain that information. Jigsaw implemented a crowdsourcing model where its users could challenge and update any records that were incorrect. In other words, every time a sales rep dialed an outdated number or had an email bounce back, rather than getting annoyed, they had an immediate opportunity to gain “points” by updating the record in Jigsaw.
The second, and less obvious change that Jigsaw has brought is a mass-market data cleansing & management solution. While Jigsaw is known as a prospecting database, a large part of its revenue comes from selling what it calls its “graveyard”. Customers with large CRM databases can compare their data to the Jigsaw graveyard, identifying and cleaning up any “dead” records. For those records that are active, Jigsaw can append missing or updated information such as direct dial phone number, new titles and more.
Acquiring Jigsaw is a very smart move by Salesforce.com. Since the birth of the CRM industry 20 years ago, one of the biggest challenges has been populating and maintain quality data. The way to get sales reps, generally averse to any kind of reporting, to actively use a CRM system is to provide compelling leads. Unfortunately, maintenance is often an afterthought, so even those systems that get off to a good start often become a neglected mess of useless information.
For traditional aggregators of people data, this will place added pressure on what was already a difficult market. Providers such as InfoGroup, D&B, Leadership Directories, Hoovers, ZoomInfo and others will need to step up their game. While each of those providers can point to core markets where they provide specialized services not offered by a generic database like Jigsaw, a significant portion of their revenues come from more general use of their data. As Salesforce more closely integrates the Jigsaw platform, it will make it significantly more difficult for these businesses to succeed.
Congratulations to Jim Fowler and the Jigsaw team. They’ve built a rapidly growing, highly disruptive business in an important segment of the content industry.
(Note: Jigsaw was named one of the "50 Content Companies that Matter" by the Content Matters blog in December, 2005).
