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August 17, 2004
Review of Lead411.com
I have been singing the praises lately for all the cool tools out there today to make running a start-up so much easier. It is amazing what you can outsource and datamine from the right web sites. The nice guys at Lead411 sent me and offer I couldn't refuse, a free account just for reviewing their service. So here is my review:
Sign-up process and pitch:
Lead411 is basically a sales lead generation site. You can get news of financings, personell changes, big deals filtered by their industry categories and served up in a web page and/or e-mail. They collect lots of this data into company profiles as well that include company contact information, key employees, business description, etc. They will also sell you lots of marketing lists sliced and diced 100 ways.
What I liked:
- The price is right. For this information, many services will charge ALOT more money. For $24.95 per month or $199 per year, it is a bargain for any sales force.
- They have an interesting affiliate marketing program to sell the service through. Looks like an effecient channel.
- The company profiles, while very sparse on operational details, are quite deep in personal contacts. The handy "vCard" download by each person's name is very cool. I was impressed that at even small start-ups (like Akaba Inc) they had a meaningful number of contacts (in this case 3).
- The personalization of the filter to your interests is quite granular.
- The daily e-mails with "leads" have an excellent format and allow you to quickly prioritize what you want to see and click through for more detail (HTML mail).
- e-mails are listed for almost every company contact.
What I didn't like:
- In company descriptions, some categories are buckets. Like employees. It is probably set by a person.
- Not all the information is indexed. For example, Lead411 showed zero press releases for AkabaInc. On their site they had 8 press releases starting on July 17, 2001 thru Sept. 23, 2003. Maybe it was an archive problem, or just the data source Lead411 is sniffing. But in any case, since it is not complete, I immediately become suspect of my search results.
- Some click-throughs didn't work. For a compay Arxan which I know something about, clicking through from the Lead411 site to press releases didn't work. No error message, nothing. Just no forwarding to the site. Also, Arxan site had 5 press releases and only 2 made it to Lead411.
- Continued data inconsistencies between the company sites and Lead411. For Arxan, there were jobs listed on the site as available but Lead411 didn't list any.
- Lead411 uses a taxonomy to categorize companies and events for those companies, but I don't know where they got it from. It doesn't seem to be SIC codes (which would be understandable). It seems to be their own invention and some categories having overlap. When a company dreams up their own taxonomy I get worried.
- When listing company contacts, most phone numbers are just the switchboard not direct numbers.
Summary:
If you are looking for an easy way to find lots of contacts at a company and stay updated on their press releases, this service would do the trick. You get alot of marketing names for your buck. At this price, you can afford other sources as well. A great inside sales tool to do calling and e-mail prospecting.
Posted by Martin at August 17, 2004 3:54 PM
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