Hoovers integrates with LinkedIn

How this works is that as a subscriber when you pull up a Hoover’s company report and view the people at the company, there is another link that allows you to see people in your LinkedIn network that are also at the company.  At the bottom of a Hoover’s record it provides a list of people on LinkedIn at the company within your network and you can sort by relevance which allows you to see which of your contacts has a connection with a particular person.  This increase the value of making sure you have a wide network of contacts.

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Friday Freebies: Hoover’s mobile

Hoover’s is a terrific business research tool that has pertinent information about 28 million companies and 36 million corporate officers.  Now they have gone mobile and are offering this service for free.  They also offer Hoover’s Mobile SP which has a advanced list building feature and one click executive phone access which is $19.99 a month.

For people in the sales arena this seems like a no-brainer.   You can pull down all kinds of information about a prospect minutes before you head into a meeting with them.

Check out: www.hooversmobile.com

New and improved Jigsaw

Its hard to keep up with all the company information sites.  Typically, they provide useful free information and require payment for the valuable corporate nuggets, particularly contact information.  Hoovers is the gold standard and made its reputation with their humorous but sometime banal business summaries.   I like Manta because they provide revenue data for free.  Jigsaw is another one and they’ve just added a tab called “research” which appears to collect web-based information from blogs and social media sites like Facebook and Flicker as well as Google news.  Its useful and easy-to-use.

The thing to remember is there is no one-stop shop for real research.  If you want very basic information, its fine to check out of any of these sites or the company website but if you really want the scoop, you need to look at everything you can in the time you have available.