Salesforce acquired Jigsaw on May 10, 2010. So what does the Jigsaw acquisition mean to users of Salesforce?
Jigsaw offers a database to supplement and enrich your contact and lead records – to see if it is up-to-date and missing any key information. More on that in a minute, but first some quick stats on Jigsaw as of June 2, 2010:
- 21MM+ B2B (Business to Business) contacts in their database
- 1MM+ data contributors add 36K new contacts daily and post updates to 12K records each day
- 800+ companies use Jigsaw today – and here’s the kicker – 70% of those 800+ companies already have Salesforce.com.
- Jigsaw sells their data to other data providers and the aforementioned 800+ companies to make revenue
What makes Jigsaw different? The data is “crowd sourced.” What does that mean? Well it’s like Wikipedia – a community made up of thousands and thousands of contributors who update the information rather than a handful of data sources (such as Hoovers, D&B or InfoUSA).
The value Jigsaw is delivering is data cleansing (updating out-of-date data), selling marketing lists, and providing data appends or enriching data (i.e. filling in missing fields on your Contact or Lead records). Better data translates into better hit rates on marketing campaigns and sales activities – or said differently, cranking up the ROI for marketing and sales because you’re reaching more potential customers!
Is your data really so bad that you need Jigsaw? Probably. The following stats were used by Jigsaw and come from the white paper: “B2B Data Decay – The Untold Story.” The report says:
- 70% of contact data was outdated in 12 months
- 65% of titles were incorrect
- 42% of addresses were incorrect
- 43% of phone numbers were incorrect
- 37% of email addresses were incorrect
With stats like these you’ve got to feel like your marketing and sales organizations is working with one hand behind your back!
One thing to note – Jigsaw provides B2B contacts not B2C (consumer). When you start harvesting and re-selling consumer data you’re getting into privacy issues – so don’t expect Jigsaw to tell you what people are doing on Facebook. The data you can expect to see in the Jigsaw database is the information presented on a person’s business card.
What’s slick, and something you saw demonstrated at Cloud Force if you were lucky enough to attend, is that at some point in a future release you’ll be able to see what records have more up-to-date information available in Jigsaw from within your Salesforce.com instance (the sync between Salesforce and Jigsaw occurs overnight). Then you can choose what data to bring in. Additionally you can query Jigsaw and bring new contacts straight into Salesforce (e.g. – you want to buy a new marketing list from Jigsaw or perhaps you want to acquire as many contacts as you can get on a specific company for your sales team).
Stay tuned!