iProfile - The Worst Service I Have Ever Used

My company signed up for iProfile back at the end of August. All I can say is that I have seen a lot of shitty sales tools in my day but this one takes the cake. I don't know what the guys at iProfile are thinking. On their website , they claim that:

"iProfile has provided the highest quality proprietary research on IT departments of large US and European companies. We provide sales and marketing teams with the information they need to generate demand, penetrate new accounts, and accelerate sales. iProfile answers these common sales questions: Who are the people in IT? What are their titles? Who do they report to? How do I contact them? Additionally, the iProfile service provides in-depth background information including company financial information, biographies of and interviews with key IT executives, and reports on current and planned infrastructure deployments."

Sounds great huh. Unfortunately, they deliver on almost none of this. What they do provide is a collection of reports, which they have gathered from the Internet and illegally packaged as their own "proprietary research". I discovered this when I did a copy/paste from one of these "reports" into Google. What I found is that this "proprietary research" was actually the work of a British Financial Reporter and to make things worse, not only did iProfile fail to credit the young man as the author of the work, they put a copyright by iProfile on the bottom of the page.

In addition to this, iProfile was unable to deliver on many of the things they claim to have on their website. They don't have organization charts of the Fortune 500 (the 500 largest U.S. based corporations). In fact, they only have organization charts of about 350 companies which span the Fortune 2000, not the F500.

Despite the fact that we did not get what we paid $18,400 for I still thought I should use the data the best I could. So, I used the emails from the iProfile database on an email campaign to alert potential buyers about our presence at an upcoming trade show. While I was setting up the list I found that the iProfile information did not contain email addresses for 90% of the contacts as we were told when they were selling us this thing. Instead, the iProfile database had emails only for about 60% of the contacts. Of these contacts, none of them were the high level decision makers we had been promised by their pitchman.

You are probably wondering how the email campaign went. IT WAS THE WORST ONE I HAVE EVER BEEN INVOLVED WITH. Of the 60% of the contacts in the iProfile database that had email addresses, 72% bounced back as undeliverable. I can't believe that we paid for this thing!

Sales Quest

I have just finished an extensive research project on the sales tool from "Sales Quest", found at www.salesquest.com . Sales Quest is the new name for the companies formally known as Seligence and Corporate Crush. Sales Quest claims on its website that they changed their name due to their rapid growth and tremendous success over the past few years. Being in sales and marketing, I find that interesting since the number one rule of a successful brand is not to mess with it.

The main product from Sales Quest is the "CRUSH Report". In these reports Sales Quest provides information such as IT implementations, IT budget information that looks as if it came from the annual report, a very rudimentary organization chart of some senior executives and a handful of IT executives, and contact information for a few of the people on the chart.

On their website, Sales Quest claims to have CRUSH Reports on the Fortune 1000. My research, which included a sales call with a guy named Ryan Murray and a sample CRUSH Report on P&G, found that Sales Quest only has 350 of the Fortune 1000 and charge either $500 per CRUSH Report or $19,000 for all of them and a one year access to their updates.

The CRUSH report does a good job of putting some IT landscape information together in an easily readable report. However, the organization charts were wrong (I had my friend who works at P&G check it) and the contact information is so minimal it would almost be better if they did not claim to offer it at all.

Review of Hoovers

I had a request to review the sales tool Hoovers (http://www.hoovers.com/). This is a tool with a lot of information. However, most of it appears to just be a bunch of public information, most likely taken from annual reports. For some this is O.K. since it is all they are looking for and Hoovers keeps them from having to gather all this information on their own. My main problems with Hoovers are price, price ranges from $70 per month to over $4,000 per year depending on what features you want, and that they claim to have contact information for "key people" at millions of companies. This is a misleading statement. What they have is the names, titles, and bios of executives which have been taken from corporate websites and annual reports. They provide the corporate switchboard number and consider this to be contact information. I don't know about you but I have had very little luck trying to break into an account via the switch board. In short, this is a good tool to find background information on an account. However, it is a poor tool if one is looking for detailed contact information.

First Post

Hey folks,

This is my first post. On this blog me and my fellow sales people in the information technology sales field will be reviewing the various sales tools out there and sharing our experiences with them. Please feel free to post you own experiences, link to this blog, and share with our online community.