For some types of searches, Google totally sucks. Are you looking for a senior editor at Wired to pitch? Until recently, Google’s built-in directory returned me as a top result, seven years after I’d lost the job. If you’re a salesperson, marketer, recruiter, or competitor researching company executives, Google is full of non-leads, and its website results are often out of date. That’s because one in four Americans changes jobs each year, according to the international Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development.
Lead411, founded in Santa Barbara in 2001 by entrepreneur Tom Blue, offers a curated directory of personal contacts and profiles that’s much more focused and efficient for salespeople, recruiters, and competitive analysts. You can use the service for free, or you can pay $30 per month or more for deeper info and Google News Alert-like updates.
Blue described the service levels to me in a phone call. “For free,” he said, “you can find out that Emilio Roman is the Director of Channel Marketing at Fortinet, and was hired on Sept 09, 2009. For a $1 a day though, you can find out Emilio’s email and work phone. Or, you could learn that cleantech startup, NexAmp, got a new $20 million contract today that’s the largest such deal in the state of Massachusetts.”
Amazingly, Blue has operated the 15-person company for nearly a decade on bootstrap funding. “We have a few investors, none of them over $10,000,” he said.
A few days ago, Lead411 added hundreds of thousands of new records, expanding to more than 1,400,000 listings. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep them up to date. But so far, Lead411 has a good rep, as proven by the quote from a Gartner director of business development: “Lead411 is my one-stop shop .. it is the most accurate source of data I’ve found to date.”
9 февраля 2010
