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!