The right contacts
POST FALLS – Jigsaw Data Corp. has parallels to eBay – it’s an online marketplace for buying, selling and trading.
But you won’t find Elvis memorabilia, used CDs or musical instruments here. The commodity for sale is virtual business cards.
For 60 cents to $1, you can purchase the name of a company’s president, chief financial officer, or other employee, along with an e-mail address and direct phone number. Or, you can trade for the information, entering a contact into the system, and getting two free contacts in return.
The Web site — www.jigsaw.com — was launched nine months ago by two former software sales representatives. Jigsaw.com has more than 1 million contacts, and users are adding about 8,000 new contacts per day, said Bob Memmer, director of operations for Jigsaw in Post Falls.
“We’ve found that most people don’t provide proprietary contacts to the site, but one person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” Memmer said. “You may have a list of contacts that won’t be valuable to you, but would be very valuable to someone else.”
Most of Jigsaw.com’s 14,000 users work in sales or marketing. They can search the site by geographic area, industry or company size. The data doesn’t include cell phone numbers or personal e-mail address.
“We’d consider that to be a tad over the top,” Memmer said. “We are catering to professionals who want to market their services to other professionals. We see business cards as a public resource. They’re something that people print and hand out.”
Jigsaw is based in San Mateo, Calif., but recently opened a five-person operations office in Post Falls. One of the founders, Jim Fowler, was a partner in Lookout Pass Ski Area for five years, before leaving to work in the software industry.
Business contacts are a $13 billion industry in the U.S., with a number of companies buying and selling data, Memmer said. Sales reps spend a significant amount of time researching companies before they make cold calls.
Mike Warren heard about Jigsaw.com from a friend. He works at Electric Light Wave Inc., in Spokane, which provides local and long-distance phone service, Internet and data networks to companies.
The field is competitive, and accurate contact information is vital, Warren said.
“I’ve used Hoover and other subscription services, but I haven’t continued them because the accuracy wasn’t that great,” he said. “So far on Jigsaw, I haven’t discovered any errors.”
At Jigsaw, information is always getting updated, Memmer said. Users get bonus points for spotting faulty contact information. The system tracks where the errors are coming from, and users who routinely enter bad data get booted, Memmer said.
Scott Clark, an insurance agent in Yakima, just spent $200 to sign up for a year of Jigsaw access. He started the service on a trial basis, and immediately found three contacts he was looking for. If he generates new clients from the contacts, the service will more than pay for itself, he said.
“It takes me a lot of time to do research, to figure out who is really making the decision about insurance, whether it’s the CEO or the chief financial officer or someone else,” Clark said. “It’s a lot more efficient if the contact information is out there.”
Jigsaw’s goals are ambitious. According to the Web site, the company’s intent is to “map every business organization on the planet,” and keep the contacts current “through a collaborative process” with users.