December 6, 2004
Online Sales Tool for sales people - interesting but I suspect useless
There's several online services (Ryze, Company of Friends, LinkedIn, etc) that enable you to network with others online. Some are more of the "personal" type, while others are more business like. A new service, Jigsaw.com, is geared towards sales people and lets them commercialize their business contacts.
Will sales people input their business contacts, buy and correct others? I don't think so.
SiliconValley.com writes The system is based on points. Enter a business card's details -- consisting of a name, title, company, e-mail and address -- and you get five points. Cell-phone numbers aren't entered, because he thinks they're too intrusive.
Once you accumulate 100 points, you can cash them in, a dollar for every five points -- provided there's a buyer of your contacts.
If within 30 days another user correctly "challenges" the information you gave -- for example points out that someone has moved -- you lose 10 points. If no one challenges, you gain five more points.
It's that ordering where Jigsaw also makes money. Sales professionals can choose to pay $25 a month to search its database for contacts. Fowler figures that a majority of sales people will find $25 easy to justify (most companies only require a receipt for expenses above $25, so Fowler bets that's a good price point). Each contact costs $1, so that a paying user can get 25 contacts a month.
Finally, though, if users don't want to pay, they can order contacts by drawing down from points they've built up -- each contact costs five points. "Pay or play," explains Fowler. It takes work: You have to have add at least 25 contacts a month to keep using the service for free.
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