Comments on: #1 Webtool for Sales People-Jigsaw

By: Tenders

Tenders — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:23:43 +0000

I’ve always liked Jigsaw and found the info useful, but I can see how the quality can be suspect in some industries it has contacts for

By: Miles Austin

Miles Austin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:56:36 +0000

Thank you for sharing your thoughts Lauren.

By: Lauren

Lauren — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:05:39 +0000

Jigsaw has been described as one of the most unethical and vile businesses on the web next to child porn. Most people I talk to tend to agree.

By: Miles Austin

Miles Austin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:54:47 +0000

Hey John, Thanks for your feedback. Sounds like Jigsaw might not be for you. You did not mention what industry you were searching in which would be good to know. If you are looking at government or some education sectors, Jigsaw is not the best solution. I maintain several thousand contacts of my own in Jigsaw, and I receive updates daily on new titles, departures, promotions, etc. Corporate phone number is the exception in my experience, though I do get cell phone numbers some times though.

Your secondary question regarding the wisdom of adding your valuable personal contacts into Jigsaw is very common. By providing your contacts into Jigsaw, you receive credits into your account that allow you to obtain contacts back that are of interest to you. In addition, every time a Jigsaw member downloads the contact information for an individual that you provided, your account receives additional credits into your account.

Those business cards that you might consider “junk” are someone else’s gold. I resisted submitting my “prize possession super duper secret contacts” for a while myself, and then realized that I was being foolish to think that I am the only one that could possibly possess such information. I will be in Jigsaw a week later and realize that someone else has the same information and they are receiving hundreds of credits per week from other users downloading the information I possess. I admit to holding tight with the information if I am in the middle of a big opportunity, but I think that is more psychology for me than any real benefit in the long run.

Is Jigsaw data perfect? Absolutely not. But as a guy that lives with the need for quality contact data every hour of my day, I stand by my recommendation-nothing is better for pure contact data in the B2B space than Jigsaw.

Thanks for reading and contributing to the blog.

By: John Smith

John Smith — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:01:34 +0000

How valuable is the contact information on Jigsaw? I followed your link, registered and searched for some contacts. I specified industry, level and country and sure enough there was a long list of contacts returned from the right sorts of companies. However, on further inspection, the quality of contact information was not very good. Updates are a couple of years old, the phone number is simply the corporate switchboard number etc. Also, if I think about it, would I add my valuable personal contacts to such a database? It’s more likely that I would simply add the contacts of the people that hand me their business cards at some trade show or other non-specific meeting just to gain the points to search for other contacts. Junk-in and Junk-out.