How Will the Salesforce/Jigsaw Acquisition Change the B2B Industry?

Updated: April 29, 2010

To look the problem, let's examine just one industry, E-Commerce, and see the results of their email campaigns:

  • less than 1 in 5 emails is opened (19.8%) and
  • over 4.5% bounces, has an abuse complaint or unsubscribes. (Source: MailChimp).

Marketers are plagued by low delivery rates and buyer apathy. And collecting data has been a massive problem - just think of those long signup forms. For instance, Saba Software, a people management software firm, required 17 fields on a white paper download. Studies show response rate drops off precipitously as required fields are added. After about three fields, response rated drop off fast. How does one capture the data Sales wants without alienating visitors? In the past, the answer was Progressive Profiling - capturing data over multiple visits -- if you can get multiple visits. But the Salesforce.com/Jigsaw deal opens new opportunities.

And since we know nothing about visitors, we design complex signup forms with a high rate of abandonment in order to capture the information salespeople want.

Jon Miller of Marketo said "Jigsaw's 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 the ability share contacts, but its long term strategic value is its ability to enrich and cleanse data online. 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."