ZoomInfo, a popular business information search engine used to find information about industries, companies and people is partnering with Microsoft to integrate its search engine into Microsoft‘s Dynamic CRM platform. ZoomInfo’s search engine has proven to be a useful tool to incorporate into CRMs because its research capabilities help identify new sales leads, expand data on existing customers, create more qualified leads and provide a single data source to integrate sales and marketing teams. Sugar CRM and SalesForce.com are also using ZoomInfo’s comprehensive search capabilities within their platforms.
ZoomInfo’s technology may not be sexy but its proven to be the basis for a good business model. The company is profitable, which in these economic times is tough for both big and small enterprises. Plus, ZoomInfo’s semantic based search engine and its vast information-delivery capabilities have caught the eye of quite a few Fortune 500 tech companies, including Oracle and Yahoo! (ZoomInfo offers a premium service products like highly powered executive only searches to companies).
ZoomInfo’s technology crawls the web to extract business information about companies and people from sources such as press releases and corporate bios on websites. The company claims its intelligence algorithm can even differentiate information about people that hold the same name.
Sugar CRM and SalesForce also connect to other competitive third-party business information databases, such LinkedIn and Hoover’s, so ZoomInfo’s engine is not the primary business information source for many CRMs. But scoring a deal with Microsoft and remaining profitable should help ZoomInfo’s applications remain competitive among fellow business search engines.
Here’s a screenshot of the integration of ZoomInfo’s on Microsoft’s CRM:
