Article first written for and published as The World’s First Customer Search Engine – Interview with Mintigo CEO, Jacob Shama on Technorati.
The proliferation of social media and content marketing strategy has introduced a wealth of valuable data that has immense potential to improve sales campaigns. But marketers have a hard time getting to, and using this information. A whole lot of time is wasted by marketers who have to sift through data and research prospects all day. One company, Mintigo, set out to give marketers an easy way to get insights from all the data across the web. And according to the company’s CEO, Jacob Shama, those insights lead directly to higher conversion rates and increased pipeline.
Mintigo’s product is best described as a Customer Search Engine. Just as Google searches the Web and social to find interesting pages, Mintigo searches the Web and social data to find interesting prospects. The engine is constantly scanning all publicly-available data, about millions of companies, to find “triggers” indicating that a particular person is ready for a particular product.
The ability to buy customer data itself is certainly not new. Firmographic data (data, pertaining to characteristics of an organization, such as employee size, revenue size, industry, number of locations and location of headquarters) can be bought from a variety of data vendors, but that approach assumes that every product seeks the same 100 fields in a database. The beauty of Mintogo’s Customer Search Engine is that it can make sense of virtually any unstructured content on the Web–the Big Data we’ve all been hearing about.
Shama explains, “We knew we were onto something when we started analyzing what we call ‘CustomerDNA‘ for our customers, and we kept finding things that surprised our customers.” One of Mintigo’s customers found that companies active on Twitter were 7X more likely to buy. Another customer found that companies with employees citing “SaaS” or “cloud” experience was 12X more likely to buy its products. Shama continues, “Just like DNA, it’s unique for everyone. But even our most sophisticated clients were learning new, powerful things about who was actually buying their products.”
In short order, Mintigo enables marketers and sales teams to leverage the Big Data of the Web and social without knowing anything about analytics. Integrated directly into Salesforce.com CRM, teams can order leads in a simple four-step process:
- Name your campaign and job function from which you would like to get leads
- Select the target industries from which you would like to get your sample customers
- Fine-tune your sample customers at the company level
- Select your desired number of leads and pay
Marketing automation software provider, Marketo, is one such case study of a company generating higher ROI with Mintigo. To deliver messaging that is both relevant and useful to prospects and clients, Marketo is using the Customer Search Engine to better understand:
- Their customer pains
- What industries they are in
- Where their individual customers fit within the greater organization
