What do you expect from data.com?

I expect a continued focus on volume of data, at the expense of accuracy.

More importantly, I think the volume of cold calls and cold emails we all receive is going to grow exponentially. Why? Contact data, like company data before it, has essentially become a commodity. B2B decision makers, everybody has access to your contact info so brace yourselves for even more cold calls and email blasts.

Whether you buy lists of email addresses & phone numbers for pennies per name or buy a data.com subscription for $99 a month, you can be sure that the decision makers you are trying to reach are already being bombarded by thousands of other sales people. Sales & marketing organizations, brace yourselves for even lower response rates.

So the question remains, what can sales and marketing organizations do to differentiate themselves, cut through the noise, and have relevant conversations with decision makers?

Craig, couldn't agree more - "lipstick on a pig" it is.

I am surprised that instead of data quality and data insight, Salesforce is focusing on volume and quantity and by adding D&B data (which is the largest but also fairly bad in terms quality based on our first hand experience) data.com becomes a cheap low quality data service.

Instead Salesforce could have made data.com a marketplace of high quality and niche data providers who all maintain their data quality to the highest standard and collective deliver the best possible data to Salesforce.com customers globally. For example: if I create a INC 500 - 5000 company database with full contact information and ensured the highest quality, I'm sure a lot of SFDC users who sell to those companies would subscribe to it and gain value from it.

QUALITY not QUANTITY is at the heart of making outbound marketing successful and data.com is moving in the exactly opposite direction.

Craig and Mark, thank you for answering.

I agree that it seems more of a marketing campaign with a fancy new domain name.

In today's social enterprise ecosystem (one thing Salesforce pitches all the time), we marketers need more than accurate contact information. We need insights that would help us to see how likely they are to engage. I think that would be the only way to move away from "disruption marketing".

I had a meeting with Dun and Bradstreet earlier this year. I left with no doubt that they were still stuck in a timewarp, producing addresses by the thousand for direct mail, with a focus on large corporations and company data, not much for SMB or contact level.

But Jigsaw isn't the answer, either. Their crowdsourced model has traction in the US, but absolutely none here. It also has little appeal for higher level companies where a few free records is less of a draw.

So what will a merger do?

What it does show is that data will be a major future battleground. Everyone now has a digital footprint and products such as Radian 6 are scraping this data to provide insights and make connections never previously available.

CRM was designed in an era where it was hard to get name, job title and company and this will leave the standard CRM architecture way behind. The true repository of this data should be the marketing system, but MA vendors show no sign of stepping up to the plate - seemingly content to let Salesforce relegate them to apps while they tilt at the windmill which is Revenue.

So this shows much more about direction than giving us anything useful here and now.

I'm a salesforce user who has used jigsaw in the past to help find point contact information. The real change (when I sign up for it) will be that I can now use data.com from within salesforce - with that integration I get updated information on the contacts that I've already got. Its an impossible task to keep your data uptodate - will this help me? Probably - at what cost I'm about to find out :)

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