Salesforce Buys Jigsaw – What it Means for B2B Marketing and Sales

Posted: April 21, 2010 | B2B Sales, Modern B2B Marketing, Product and Industry

Salesforce today announced a definitive agreement to buy Jigsaw, a provider of business information and data services that uniquely leverages crowd-sourcing to build and maintain its database. (Note: Jigsaw is also a Marketo customer and partner.)

I have long thought that delivering “data services in the cloud” has the potential to deliver major benefits to B2B marketing and sales professionals, and this acquisition should accelerate this vision.

Why? Like Marketo, Jigsaw is a founding member of the Marketing Cloud, an alliance of cloud-based marketing services that make internal marketing functions more efficient and external marketing programs more effective. The vision is to deliver powerful marketing capabilities while eliminating the cost, risk and complexity of traditional approaches, and the more resources Jigsaw has to pursue this joint vision, the better.

Jigsaw is best known for helping companies acquire contacts, but I think the real strategic value is in the ability to enrich and cleanse data in the cloud. For example, imagine the ability to automatically enrich new leads with firmographic information such as company size, revenue, and industry as well as contact information such as an accurate direct-dial phone number. Without the need to ask these questions on registration forms, you can dramatically improve landing page conversion rates and automate additional lead scoring rules to help deliver the best leads more quickly to sales. (Other companies are also starting to deliver this real-time data augmentation capability, most notably another Marketing Cloud alliance member, Demandbase.)

Further, when data services live in the cloud alongside your CRM and marketing automation systems, it creates the opportunity to maintain your lead and contact database automatically. Imagine the ability to eliminate duplicates, remove dead records, and update contact information dynamically as the data are updated – this has the potential to increase response and conversion rates dramatically.

Jigsaw already provides some of these capabilities today via their enterprise products such as DataFusion, and this acquisition should give them the resources to do even more while remaining open to other CRM and marketing automation solutions. As the ability to deliver on the vision of real-time data augmentation and cleansing comes online, I think it has the potential to revolutionize the way we generate leads.

What do you think? How will this acquisition affect your B2B marketing and sales efforts?

Related Resources

http://www.spearmarketing.com/blog Howard J. Sewell

Jon, like you I’m excited about the potential. As a user of both Salesforce and Jigsaw (and Marketo) – the possibility of real-time data augmentation and validation is very exciting, especially from the point of view of conversion rates and being able to require less data from the user. The big unknown is how SFDC will incorporate or integrate Jigsaw functionality – one hopes it won’t be available to only enterprise customers.
http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/ david raab

I agree with your assessment about the value of automated augmentation and updating. But don’t forget the possibility of prospecting lists as well–probably the thing that salespeople value most of all.
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http://www.siriusdecisions.com Alden Cushman

Hello Jon,

Good post and I agree there is good value for SFDC and its clients to have access to this kind of contact information, but why buy Jigsaw? If you are a SFDC client don’t you want access to that type of data from a variety of sources (Jigsaw, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, etc.)? Why not remain data agnostic and make it easy for clients to access and use any and all rather than just one source? Yes, it increases the value of SFDC and helps justify future price increases, but also puts them in direct competition with all the other contact data providers.
http://www.d4bmarketing.com Dave Finkelstein

I want my prospecting data from multiple sources but this deal makes sense.
http://Focus.com Scott Albro

Jon, this is a very strategic acquisition for Salesforce, but I don’t think the big win is around data services in the cloud. I think SFDC is really trying to make their CRM product a living/breathing app. What does that mean? It means that Salesforce will start populating the app with records, leads, data, etc… for its customers. It also means that customers will have to pay for that which is really what this is about.
http://ideamamaadnetwork.com Alex – we’re looking for B2B leads & marketing partners

OOps, how did I miss that acquisition news
Interesting to see the development around deal.

Btw, would be happy to work with you guys on lead generation for our clients (with SEO, social media, email marketing, display ads, telesales or whatever you excel at) utilizing our Pay Per Deal advertising model.

Ping me if interested.

bizdev, Alex
http://www.idology.com Jodi Florence

To me this feels like another way SFDC is wanting to compete more with its marketing app exchange vendors. Granted the proof is in the pudding of how this gets incorporated (and sold) to SFDC customers, but it seems as if SFDC is finally realizing that marketing can drive their platform expansion within a company a lot more than sales.

Jon (@jonmiller) leads all aspects of Marketo’s thought leadership, communications, and content marketing programs. In 2010, The CMO Institute named Jon a Top 10 CMO for companies under $250 million revenue. Jon holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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