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.