Data.com

Data.com is a crowdsourced contact database made available in the SalesForce suite of business tools. It's natively integrated with the SalesForce CRM so this is a pre-requisite for obtaining Data.com services. In the interest of transparency I am only a SalesForce trial user though have extensive B2B lead generation experience using many different sources and tools and believe my perspective can lend value to the reader. I find the dominance by SalesForce in the business software as a service industry intriguing. I can only congratulate them on building such a powerful brand. SalesForce has such authority in their market they are a household name in the business world. Beyond that they have setup their business model in such a way that truly leverages every possible opportunity to create multiple recurring monetization channels. I can only imagine the revenue they incur and the growth they've experienced and because they are a public company I may look into this further and would consider purchasing stock in this company because after reviewing the popularity of their software overall via big data it's clear they are an incredibly dominant authority with mid-size to enterprise level businesses with at least four of their SAAS in the top one hundred of the most popular business software online, including Data.com. Utilizing Data.com for prospecting and lead generation purposes would be a dream come true for most sales reps. Especially in that you must be using SalesForce to utilize this real time, cleaned, current contact data, and import it directly into your CRM. Together the CRM and Data.com make a powerful combination with the most accurate, current data possible via crowdsourcing by millions people. I'm aware of at least two dozen services or software that can do B2B lead generation. The one I've used most cost $37 and it's as current as Google My Business contact information is. Though if if chose to grow my company with a complete set of tools knowing my ROI would be significant I would choose SalesForce and all of it's add-ons. The tiered plans are well laid out. The basic version gets you all relevant data to make a connection with just about any business including email addresses. The next level subscription includes a much greater level of detail per contact. This would be the optimal choice for most businesses. It includes four times the possible data for each contact. The top tier subscription is about twice as much in detail as this though I'm not sure how much of this information would be redundant for most businesses. It may suit very specialized organizations best.

I was disappointed unless I'm mistaken to learn that Data.com was natively integrated into SalesForce because as a start up business it's simply not viable to invest in SalesForce and all of it's add-ons at once until we establish the brand and can measure a certain ROI that can justify it. So while it's tremendously smart of SalesForce from a business standpoint it simply cannot be an option, even though I would love it to be, based on the pricing. I've read that data cannot always be updated because there often isn't enough information to create a reliable match and that it can take six months or more for some records to become current. I've also read of another feature that makes perfect sense to have built in but doesn't currently exist. Which is the ability to know which contacts in the Data.com database are currently an existing customers of relevant products or services in your industry. That would be an amazing feature and something that would truly differentiate Data.com from the competition so far in my research.

Overall, Data.com provides the best possible real time, cleaned, current contact data in the B2B industry. The information available in your Data.com beyond besides the accurate contact profile is the ability to learn about your prospect via other means such as social channel and import all of it into your SalesForce CRM together with all of their other add-ons is the ultimate business solution. SalesForce empowers sales reps. But it comes with too much of a cost for most.