‘To Post’ or ‘Not To Post’ ? That’s the question that keeps bothering me if the website I am about to review can be useful but not very ethical. And that’s the case with Jigsaw, as much as I may find its service unethical its growth and popularity seem to indicate that it works quite well for many people. So, here it goes
Jigsaw is a place where you can get access to not so easy to obtain business contacts. It has over 3 million business contact records within 300,000 companies with several thousands of contacts added on a daily basis. You simply search for a contact you need anf if it exists in jigsaw’s database you get contact’s name, title, email and phone number. To the question ‘Who Uses Jigsaw?’ company states following
A: Sales people, recruiters, marketers, researchers, job seekers, small business owners, and anyone else who needs high quality low cost corporate contact information. Members use Jigsaw to look for direct contact information from a particular organization. With these reliable contacts members are able to close more deals. See our success stories.
How does it work:
Each contact will cost you 5 jigsaw points. There are several ways you can get points. You can either buy them at $0.20 for 1 point (1 contact=5 points=$1) or get 10 points eachtime you submit new or correct exisitng contact. To try jigsaw out without paying anything you can sign up with free trial account which is valid for 14 days and comes with 50 points (equivalent to 10 contacts). After trial period is over you can switch either to PAY or PLAY account. See difference between these two in the image below
Some additional information;
Some other popular websites offering similar service are InfoUSA and Hoovers
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Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: business
I received an email from Sales Dog, a sales newsletter I receive. It was from one of their “partners” Jigsaw. It looked like it would be a great service especially since it kept saying FREE FREE FREE. I signed up for it and kept noticing mentions of “points” and couldn’t figure out why I needed to gain points since it was FREE FREE FREE! I decided to download a company profile just to see what info it had and how the download process worked. Immediately on trying to download my FREE company profile up popped a screen telling me I needed to pay one of three membership levels. The top level allowed a whopping 150 or so downloads a month. I don’t know how you are suppose to download the 50,000 records at a time mentioned in their “overview” on their web site (copy below). To me this is a dishonest, unethical company out to rip people off!
Overview
Here at Jigsaw, we believe that free access to company data is a basic business right. That’s why Jigsaw declared “Data Independence Day” on June 4, 2008 and set all of its company data free - literally.
With the Open Data Initiative Jigsaw is making it easy to search, select, and download company information from our large directory of over 1 million businesses - for free! In essence, Jigsaw’s company data is now “open source”.
No more renting or buying costly company directory lists.
Download up to 50,000 complete company records at a time.
Utilize Jigsaw’s optional data maintenance and cleaning services.
Import or integrate complete company data records into your CRM or Contact Management application.