Jigsaw – Company and Employee information. Relatively Free.

November 2, 2009 / in Social Media / by Jason Terry

I am always looking for new and relevant social media related tools. Jigsaw is one that you should know about.  Jigsaw is a service that can provide you with up to date contact information for people and where they work.  This information can be incredibly valuable for sales and marketing efforts. 

Traditionally, you would have to spend a lot of money for an annual subscription to a service to have access to this kind of information.  Also, the data from some of these types of services isn’t always up to date.

On Jigsaw, you can either buy lists of contact information, or you can earn credits towards getting contacts by providing contact information.  This method of getting contact information by providing contact information is one of the reasons that Jigsaw has over 17 million contact records, representing more than 3.5 million companies in their system.  In my random searches, I have found the information on Jigsaw to be reliable, comprehensive and up to date.

Jigsaw provides an advanced search function that allows you to find contacts based on a wide set of criteria.  For example, you can search on Title, Name, Company, Zip Code, Industry, Employee count, Revenue, Ownership, Website domain type and more.  You can even save these searches for future use.  Let’s say that your marketing department is trying to target C-Level contacts at companies with between 25 and 100 employees in zip codes 66211 and 64108 with Revenue between $1 and $10 million dollars annually.  Just plug the information in, and the results come back immediately.  I actually did this search and found 123 people that meet these criteria.  I could either buy their contact information for $1 each, or trade in “points” that I have earned for submitting contact records.  (Basically, submitting 1 contact record gives you enough points to buy 2 contacts records)

Jigsaw is a compelling tool for generating a prospect list for sales and marketing.  If you don’t already have the list of companies that you know you should be talking to, give Jigsaw a shot for generating that list.  Having a list of prospects is the first step in growing the bottom line through sales.