I’ve been in sales and marketing for over twenty years now and I’ve used everything to try find information on the people I was targeting. Like many of you I found that most of the traditional data sources, like databases and lists have some good data but a large percentage of it was old, outdated and just wrong for what I was trying to do.
So just like you I turned to the Internet and with some success I started finding information here and there on the people I needed to talk to. What I quickly realized though was how much time I was spending looking for that data and how many time I came up completely empty handed. That’s when it hit me, there had to be a better way. There had to be someone or something out there that could help me find what I was looking for faster. The rest of this story changed everything for me not just how I look for company and contact data.
I met Donato Diorio from Broadlook Technologies in early 2002 and even though he was, at that time, focused on the recruiting industry I knew he had something that could help the B2B sale and marketing segment. Our paths crossed several times over the years and we bantered about B2B sales and marketing data but it wasn’t until 2007 while I was working on a very large business development project that I realized that the traditional tools used to find data on companies and contact were so bad. Shortly after that project ended I did some work for a startup where again I found myself looking for a better tool to find the data I needed, but this time it was worse because the companies we were targeting where not large enough to be in those traditional databases I’d used in the past. It just so happen that at that time I ran into Donato again and he told me I should take another look at his tools. He said that now they were much more effective for B2B contact searches. I did so and six months later Datasentials, my company, signed an agreement with Donato and Broadlook to represent and establish channels to bring their products to the B2B market.
The Broadlook suite of products is the most innovative set of tools I have come across in my 22 years of sales and marketing experience. I use them on a daily basis and can’t imagine how much time I have wasted over the years. These tools automate the data mining process of looking on the web for company and contact information. They are fast, effective and flexible allowing you to quickly find the information you need. In minutes you can find information that would take you hours, days or even weeks to compile by hand. Cut, Copy and Paste was a great invention but when you have to sort through hundreds or thousands of web pages and cut, copy, paste all day to get the data you need you figure out very quickly that it eats up a tremendous amount of your time. The Broadlook tools grab the data, put it into a friendly tabular format and then allow you to send it wherever you need to. I, like many of you, use Outlook as my contact manager and getting the data into Outlook couldn’t be easier.
If you have tried all the traditional sources and even some of the new ones on the web you understand the problems I faced while looking for the data I needed. You can find it but sometimes it’s old, sometimes it’s wrong and many times it’s spread all over in different places. Even if you find it how do you know it’s good and how do you get it into somewhere where you can use it. That’s where the Broadlook tolls really shine. First of all, is the data even out there on the web or not, I don’t spend hours looking for something that isn’t out there, the tools tell me in minutes. Second, how good and how fresh is the data? The Profiler product has a scoring process that tells you how reliable the data is, the higher the score the better the data source. I can even go directly to the page where it found the data to check for myself. Third, capturing the data and getting it into somewhere where I can use it without spending hours downloading or cut, copy and pasting. And finally, the flexibility of searching and getting what I want and not what I don’t need.
I’m not here to tell you that there is no work involved with using these tools but I here to tell you that the time you spend will produce tenfold to what you’ve done in the past. The better you get at using these tools the better your results continue to get. Like I said before, they are incredible tools and if you’re looking for the next generation of contact information research tools you really need to take a look at the Broadlook suite of products. You can see all the Broadlook tools at www.datasentials.com/products/broadlook
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