Jigsaw, a data provider, just announced it would be offering free company contact data.

Call the Open Data Initiative, Jigsaw’s free data is available in file formats compatible with Salesforce, SugarCRM, Oracle CRM On Demand, Entellium, Maximizer, Sage’s ACT, Landslide and NetSuite.

The information in Jigsaw’s online database comes from member contributions, unlike other contact-list companies. The Open Data Initiative service is downloadable and searchable by geographic location, industry, sub-industry and the number of employees.

“You can go to a lot of places and get company data. The big difference is, go try to download data from anywhere,” said Jim Fowler, Jigsaw’s CEO. “From here you can download 50,000 records at one time, and it’s free.”

It isn’t a perfect data solution, of course—not at that price. Jigsaw plans to give away the company-level contact data, but its collection of some 8 million individual contact records will only be available for a price.

“Some people will try to clean it themselves,” Fowler said. “We’re going to try and price [the services] reasonably.”

Doesn’t make much sense? Fowler admits that the sales industry isn’t made up of “altruists,” but Jigsaw’s marketing and business plan has gained it increased growth since a 2004 launch.

“What we had to do is have a system that rewarded and punished. You need points in order to get the data off that you covet,” he said.

Users earn those points by uploading data, cleaning out bad data, or  buying it. Based on Web 2.0 principles, the site’s 400,000 members work to ensure the accuracy of the data by “self policing” if bad information is entered.

“You can do a very little bit of damage to the database, but very quickly our community stops you,” he said.

Jigsaw plans to make application programming interfaces available for software developers, and also aims to break into the global market.

“The main thing for us is we want to make this global,” Fowler said. “A global, gigantic Rolodex.”

Maximizer Software, a CRM vendor, supports Jigsaw’s move and plans to use the free data in its own contact database.

Web 2.0 concepts such as social networking sites, wikis and blogs increasingly drive data gathering opportunities.  Jigsaw’s open-source concept may be only the first of many similar services to come.

 

We’ve established that customer relationship management has become if not a necessity, then at least a powerful tool in today’s sales world.

So let’s say you’ve got your CRM system set up, and you want to make sure you’re getting the most function out of your investment.

Let’s begin with the analytic tools. Do you know who your most profitable customer is? That’s only the beginning of what you can learn from data you already have, but it’s going to take some housecleaning to make it work for you.

If you have a bunch of spreadsheets and databases serving different functions in different locations, it’s time to consolidate.

“Multiple spreadsheets, databases or systems are a familiar feature for many SMBs but it’s impossible to do any profitability analysis until you have a single version of the truth,” says Jason Nash at ComputerWeekly.com.

Move all data into one location, and verify its accuracy. Current, correct information is time-consuming but necessary; an out-of-date database can hurt you. Data cleaning is a “major issue” in CRM systems. There may be a learning curve here, but consolidating your data is a “foundation” for getting the most from your analysis tools. Now, it’s a tool you can use to track patterns and trends; extract specific data to view in different ways; mine data in order for more information on relationships, classify it and use it to forecast future trends; and correlate commonly used e-mail addresses, Web addresses and other text.

Once you’ve cleaned up and streamlined all of this customer information from all sources, such as departmental/divisional databases, including sales, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, finance, service and more, you’re ready to begin a targeted marketing campaign.