• Salesforce Finally Fully Integrates Jigsaw Data Into CRM

    Leena Rao

    Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

    Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

    Just over a year ago, Salesforce acquired Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. The startup crowdsources information on professionals and companies and currently has a database of information on more than 24 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies. Now Salesforce is integrating Jigsaw’s data into its CRM product, giving sales representatives greater, realtime intelligence when curating and following up on leads.

    So Jigsaw will be natively available to all 94,000 users who are using Salesforce’s CRM. Jigsaw’s data was previously only available via an app on the AppExchange. Salesforce says that the Jigsaw community adds 36,000 new contacts and updates an additional 12,000 existing contacts daily.

    Salesforces’s exec Scott Holden says that the benefit to users goes beyond just access to the data. Reps can compare their existing data to Jigsaw’s data to clean up their own data. And he says that the quality of Jigsaw’s data (which has been questioned in the past) is fairly accurate thanks to the startup’s community of user who help contribute and clean up the data.

    The Jigsaw-integrated version of Salesforce CRM will be released in June.

    Salesforce paid roughly $142 million in cash, plus earnout for Jigsaw.

    Company: Salesforce
    Website: salesforce.com
    Launch Date: 1999
    IPO: February 7, 2004, NYSE:CRM

    Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing company that provides business software on a subscription basis. The company is best known for its on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, and went public in June 2004. Salesforce has been a pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through its innovative AppExchange directory of on-demand applications, and its Force.com “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) API for extending Salesforce.

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