Today, I want to introduce you to an under-the-radar product called CardBrowser (www.cardbrowser.com). If you're a Jigsaw, ZoomInfo or LinkedIn user, you're really going to like this concept. It goes like this: CardBrowser associates are continually visiting trade shows (in the hundreds) around the country. While making their rounds at these shows, they visit each booth on the hunt for the energetic, outgoing, customer-facing representatives. Once they've identified their targets, they dive in, grab their business cards and head to the next booth. This results in roughly 10-20k new contacts each year. These cards are scanned into a database that is searchable by trade show name, industry, location, company, and title.
So who are these contacts in the database and how can you, as a recruiter, benefit from this database? Pick a title and they are there at your disposal: corporate executives, account executives, sales engineers, product managers, program managers, and techies (to name a few). There are over 150,000 business cards in the system replete with all pertinent contact information. I did a search for government related conferences (my industry) and had over 13,000 contacts. I then narrowed it down to people with Program Manager as a title. That's my marketing list of clients for the next 5 years!
Most of the CardBrowser customers are corporations. On their website, they proudly display IBM, Oracle, Google, Cisco, Yahoo, EMC, SAP, and Sun as users of the product. But I can also see this particularly useful if you are in executive search - specifically in the areas of sales, sales engineering and marketing. These are your “A” candidates. These are the folks that will tell you who is hiring in their company. These are the decision makers who do the hiring in their company.
The database access retails for $3,500. Add in the ability to export into a spreadsheet and you're looking at a total of $8,000. A new feature that I'm working to provide my readers is discounts on the products that I review. Dennis Young of CardBrowser has consented to offering the database at $2,500 and the full package at $6,000 if you mention this blog. And just so there is no perceived bias, I don't make a cent from referring this product.
Have you used CardBrowser? What's your experience been with it? Share your comments!
3 comments:
Hi Bill.
I work at ZoomInfo and we've just introduced a new product in beta. It's called Zipi, the plugin for Microsoft Outlook. With Zipi you can look up contact information on over 15 million professionals: name, company address, company URL, phone and email. And it's free.
To learn more about Zipi, here is the URL (submitted for your consideration): http://www.zoominfo.com/zipi
Hi Bill,
I am actively searching for an alternative to cardbrowser.com for a variety of reasons. Do you know of any?
We have been looking into cardbrowser but found some inconsistencies in their claims in regards to how many cards are in their database. We have marketing emails from them that say 300,000 then we got one that said they have 250,000 (amount went down on a more recent email) and then their site says they have over 500,000 in one spot and 300,000 in another. If you do a search on their demo database they have 354,793. Since they say that the demo is everything they have I guess this is the real number but I am suspect of an organization that just tosses numbers out. I'm not sure how much this really matters since in the end it is only the business cards from the last 6-12 months that matter. Any thoughts on this? As for zoominfo, you may as well just use Google.
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