When Clairmail, a San Rafael, Calif.-based mobile banking technology provider, was founded in 2004, the company had two sales people who prospected using only the contacts in their Rolodex. To grow, and to “be more professional” in its targeting, the company decided to buy lists and shop for bulk data, says Sean Mulvihill, director of marketing operations at Clairmail.
During the company’s second year, it worked with direct marketing companies Harte-Hanks and InfoUSA to enhance the prospect list for its direct mail campaign. Mulvihill says Clairmail “saw results,” but the company became “hungry for better data.” It turned to Jigsaw‘s business directory, which allowed Clairmail to “compete for quantity and test quality and see economies of scale in processing [marketing] tests.”
Mulvihill says Clairmail can now prospect new leads more efficiently because the lists he receives are more accurate and better segmented, enabling his company to request less information from opt-in leads and ultimately eliminate bad leads.
“Jigsaw was at least 10% more accurate than the closest vendor in competitive trials,” he says. “Their lists deliver an increase in productivity, response rates, leads and sales.”
Mulvihill says he arrived at the 10% figure by comparing four major data vendors (Harte-Hanks, InfoUSA, Hoovers and Accuity Solutions) and two boutique vendors from Florida (he could not recall the boutique vendors). Each was given the following sales specifications: all prospects had to be banking professionals from two or three specific business lines.
With each vendor, Mulvihill says he noticed “cracks” in their data. However, he argues that Jigsaw’s crowd-sourcing model, which allows users to participate and make changes to erroneous data in the system, means it has “tons of eyes on it” and that the incentive is on members to keep data clean “as opposed to a big data vendor commoditizing on a price.”
Since implementing Jigsaw’s data, Clairmail has grown to 20 sales reps and the company sends out monthly email campaigns. Clairmail salespeople perform less maintenance work than they did using other systems and the product, which was integrated with Salesforce.com in April 2010, allows the company to see how data filters through campaign influence.
“If we spend $50,000 on an email campaign and 150 banking pros bite on the campaign and respond to it and I track them through the pipeline, I can also run a report on the source of that data,” says Mulvihill.
By running campaign influence tests, Mulvihill also found that the data generated by Jigsaw is the No. 1 lead source tied to sales for Clairmail. Thirty percent of sales are tied in some function to Jigsaw, he says.
“If you took away 30% of my campaign influence, you would chop the legs out from under our operation,” he says.
