Jigsaw is a clear innovative in the B2B business contact lists space. All outbound B2B marketing is completely dependent on the quality of the list and Jigsaw came up with an innovative idea that made it possible to buy contacts at a small price, buy lots of them on demand and with a fair bit of accuracy in terms of contact data update.
Having said that, there are clearly two separate camps. Some who clearly hate Jigsaw and some who clearly love it. Here are some reasons why one might not like Jigsaw:
- Jigsaw makes it possible for any person to find your business contact information and put it up on Jigsaw without your permission for all of the Jigsaw users and buyers to use it.
- TechCrunch has a whole slew of privacy related complaints that you can read about here.
- The quality sucks for a range of different verticals including government and manufacturing, which we have tried ourselves and have seen less than 30% accuracy.
- The core model allows a user to upload a contact and get a contact or equivalent points in exchange, which is cool but their TOS allows the company to then sell that contact to any number of customers without giving back anything to the end user who added the contact in the first place.
If you ask any sales person though, they love Jigsaw for a number of valid reasons:
- Jigsaw is the easiest way to get a whole bunch of contacts for any campaign in the shortest period of time with a certain level of accuracy.
- Its better than a lot of other so-called contact databases which are just not as deep-rooted or updated.
- The benefit of getting the contact email address and direct phone number is invaluable to say the least.
- Jigsaw is a great way for someone to quickly get a few names in the target organization at their key accounts to quickly get to their decision makers than having to struggle with door keepers who just won’t let them in.
I am sure there are more pros and cons and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I am split right now. I love their model to address this very large and fragmented market opportunity of business contact lists, but I think their model needs to evolve to address some of the downsides. I hope someone there is listening.