Welcome. If you like what you see, you can automatically receive these free semi-weekly posts by email or RSS feed. See the right side of the screen for instructions; it only takes 10 seconds. You will receive a verification email if you choose to receive by email. If you don't immediately receive this email, please check your spam folder. We will never sell or misuse your email address.

[I had the opportunity recently to ask Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw, some questions about his company. Jigsaw is a fast growing company with interesting concepts regarding leads that will be of interest to many sales professionals.]

1. You are the CEO of Jigsaw. What is the history of Jigsaw?

Jigsaw was founded in late 2003 with the mission of mapping every business organization on the planet. The concept was that salespeople could work together to build a gigantic shared Rolodex.

Jigsaw launched in late 2004, has raised $18M in venture funding, currently has ninety employees and has over 500K members (mostly sales professionals) who build and maintain the collaborative database.

2. Who do you consider your biggest competitors and what are the differentiators?

Jigsaw competes most directly with traditional data companies like Hoovers and InfoUSA. Jigsaw differs from them in several key ways:

They build and maintain their own databases. We believe there is no way a few dozen or even a few hundred employees can compete with an army of 500K motivated salespeople who build and maintain the Jigsaw shared Rolodex.

We have many more contacts and they are much better. Specifically, every single Jigsaw contact is complete – including email address and phone number. Seventy-two percent of Jigsaw contact records have a direct dial phone number. Virtually none of our competitors’ records have either an email address or a phone number.

We give our company data away for free. Members can download up to 50K complete company records at a time in the format of all of the major CRM systems.

3. As a sales professional what are some of the compelling reasons for me to use Jigsaw for leads versus more traditional ways of lead attainment such as leads lists and networking groups?

Jigsaw’s data is not only complete, but it is also much fresher than any other lead list. Jigsaw’s 500K members constantly clean the data, updating records and graveyarding dead ones.

Jigsaw is, in essence, the largest networking group around. There are currently almost nine million complete contact records on Jigsaw.

In essence, Jigsaw is doing to the traditional data companies what Wikipedia has done to Encyclopedia Britannica.

4. Is Jigsaw responding to a change in how professional salespeople network and acquire leads?

We prefer to think that Jigsaw is changing the way sales professionals network and acquire leads. Never before have leads of this quality been so easily obtainable. We believe the increase in transparency of data will fundamentally change the way salespeople sell. We believe that it will no longer be about just getting the data, but about how to rise above the noise. We believe salespeople are going to have to become better marketers in order to get a prospect’s time.

5. What is your sales demographic and industry demographic? In other words, are you marketing Jigsaw to certain types of sales professionals that operate in certain industries?

Technology sales professionals were the early adopters, but now sales professionals from all industries and company sizes use Jigsaw. We offer a Jigsaw Team product that allows entire sales teams to use Jigsaw. We have over 600 of these corporate accounts.

Members use Jigsaw for two main purposes – to find prospects and to map organizations in order to understand the buying influencers for deals farther in the pipe. Our market must almost always perform one or both of these tasks on a regular basis.

We also sell our CRM cleaning and maintenance services to CRM owners/administrators. This is the fastest growing part of our business.

[Thank you, Jim, for answering my questions. I think many readers will be interested in looking into Jigsaw further. Scott]

To receive this blog by email <click here> to receive by RSS <click here>. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Tags: Prospecting, prospects, technology

We'd like to hear your feedback on this post - feel free to comment below!