Hoover’s Launches new Platform for Sales and Marketing Professionals

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hoover’s, Inc. (www.hoovers.com) today announced the immediate availability of a new platform that underscores Hoover’s commitment to staying ahead of its customers’ needs for sales and marketing solutions that help them grow their businesses. The new platform delivers additional workflow tools to facilitate the sales cycle, expand insight for more targeted high-yield prospecting, and more ways to connect with decision makers and influencers.

“I love that you are adding email contact information through your alliance with Jigsaw”

“Hoover’s recognizes that customers are seeking value beyond data. While quality data is certainly a foundational element of any Sales 2.0 tool, our customers are finding increased value in the tools they use to access and act upon data,” said Hyune Hand, Hoover’s President. “With this launch, we’re building upon our best-in-class business information with the right workflow and integration tools required to deliver a more personal and relevant customer experience.”

New and Enhanced Tools

In addition to improved, highly efficient navigation, Hoover’s site delivers new and enhanced functionality, including:

Customizable Sales Alerts and Event Triggers – relevant, real-time, event-driven information about prospects and customers (for example, executive activity, earnings, mergers, acquisitions, new products), sourced from news feeds and company Web sites, and delivered via email or CRM.
Downloadable Family Trees that will help customers understand the scope of a company and, for example, identify subsidiaries that can be targeted for account development, create sales territories, develop rules of engagement for their sales teams, and actually take action based on the insight.
Notes & Tags feature that provides “mini CRM” functionality, allowing customers to add private, custom notes and labels to companies and contacts that are relevant to them.
Downloadable Financial Charts and Graphs, which can be easily saved and added into presentations to support planning and analysis initiatives.
Customizable Competitive Landscapes, which let customers choose up to three companies they want to compare.

“The Hoover’s site is now more intuitive and responsive,” said Hoover’s subscriber and Vice President of a Fortune 50 bank. “Some of the interactive features like Notes and Tags help make Hoover’s a one-stop-shop for sales-oriented tasks.”

Expanded Insight

The new Hoover’s also builds upon its unparalleled company, people and industry intelligence with additional actionable information, including:

Fully integrated, in-depth First Research Industry Profiles, including Call Prep Questions, Email Alerts and State and Province Profiles, which provide industry-specific insight to help support marketing research, as well as sales call preparation and strategy.
Enhanced Hoover’s company records and Build A List tool, with more data points and fields for better targeting and qualifying:
- D&B Prescreen Scores, which predict the likelihood a company will pay its bills on time in the next 12 months. Companies are identified as High, Medium or Low Risk.
- Plant/Facility Size, a useful data point for customers such as utility companies, commercial cleaning services and property management firms.
- Latitude/Longitude, useful data for those in the transportation and routing industries, for example.
- Minority-owned/Women-owned, a data point customers specifically requested.
- Eight-digit SIC (Standard Industry Classification) Codes, which will help customers with niche products get more granular in their prospecting.

“With Hoover’s, it’s not only easy to find the information I need, but I am also able to filter out information I don't want just as easily,” said Theresa Craven, Business Development Manager for CEVA Logistics. “The in-depth First Research industry reports are also fantastic, and have helped tremendously when we’re targeting a new or niche market.”

More Ways to Connect

Hoover’s customers can now more easily prospect, plan and make smart business decisions from a global perspective, thanks to expanded company and contacts databases:

Double the coverage – more than 65 million enterprises and 85 million professional contacts worldwide allow subscribers to find more prospects that look like their best customers.

Hoover’s ConnectMail, powered by Jigsaw, lets customers use the Build A List tool to download from among millions of Jigsaw email addresses for targeted campaigns. Customers can also save and manage these emails from a central location, thus increasing workflow efficiency.

“Sales and marketing pros rank determining the effectiveness of their spending as their number one barrier,” notes Chuck Richard, VP and Lead Analyst at leading information industry analyst firm, Outsell, Inc. “Hoover’s new workflow tools and ways to connect respond directly to this call for effectiveness.”

“I love that you are adding email contact information through your alliance with Jigsaw,” said Diane Mammon, VP Marketing for a New York technology firm. “Hoover’s is an invaluable tool for us and it’s wonderful to see your commitment to adding value, soliciting customer feedback, and keeping your product fresh and innovative.”

In addition to launching new tools and content, Hoover’s continues to deliver on improving customers’ sales productivity by offering plug-and-play integration with major CRM players, as well as an industry standard Web services API for integration into customers’ preferred workflow applications, such as ERP and Intranets.

The launch of Hoover’s new platform follows a months-long preview period, during which customers tested the site’s functionality and provided feedback that guided the development and reflects Hoover’s commitment to customer responsiveness and seamlessly integrating within their daily workflows.

“We’ve worked closely with our customers throughout this process to ensure we’re not only meeting their needs, but exceeding their expectations,” continued Hand. “With more than two decades under our belt, our customers trust Hoover’s as the leader in providing actionable business information. We’re confident this new platform paves the way to further cement Hoover’s reputation as the source for indispensable company, people and industry intelligence.”

About Hoover's, Inc.

Hoover’s, founded in 1990, is a D&B company that provides its customers with insight and actionable information about companies, industries and key decision makers, along with the powerful tools to find and connect to the right people to get business done. Hoover’s provides this information for sales, marketing, business development, and other professionals who need intelligence on U.S. and global companies, industries, and the people who lead them. Hoover’s unique combination of editorial expertise and one-of-a-kind data collection with user-generated and company-supplied content gives customers a 360-degree view and competitive edge. This information, along with powerful tools to search, sort, download and integrate the content, is available through Hoover’s (http://www.hoovers.com), the company’s premier online service. Hoover’s is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Follow Hoover’s on Twitter: @hoovers.