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.