pipecandy

概述

Anyone who’s ever been in sales and had to cold-call potential clients knows that me using the phrase “potential clients” is an overstatement. Their managers hand them a stack of names and contact information and call these leads, but really they’re leads in the same way that a heavy guy in a red wool suit is Santa Claus. They look real, and salespeople want to believe that they are, but they’re not going to get what they want unless they go get it for themselves. Cold calling is just a waste of time.

这与PipeCandy的联合创始人之一Ashwin Ramasamy到达的结论是一个类似的结论，当时他试图在2012年为他的先前的初创公司Contractiq找到客户。因此，他和他的团队追求将其应用程序开发外包的所有业务。As it turned out, that was a really big bucket and they wasted a lot of time cold-calling all the people who were never going to be interested in the first place—something they might have known if they’d had even the slightest bit of data about these companies going into the call.

如果有必要是发明的母亲，那么沮丧就必须是其父亲。Ramasamy需要一些东西来使他的出站营销努力更加高效和富有成果，而他的挫败感使他进入了下一个项目。

Ramasamy与联合创始人Murali Vivekanandan和Shrikanth Jagannathan一起创建了PipeCandy，这是一个营销情报平台，可帮助帐户高管在不得不拿起手机之前，在他们拿起手机之前。这种服务并不是什么新鲜事物，但是PipeCandy的方法是：他们已经继续前进，并宣布电子商务为自己的垂直行业，因此在其平台上索引的54百万公司都是在线零售商。

您可能会质疑这个想法：如何将护肤产品的卖家与销售专门的A/V电缆的网站混合在一起？在您意识到这有多大意义之前，只需几秒钟的批判思想。由于它们既是电子商务业务又有类似的运营需求：服务器，机架，软件，付款处理，网页设计和运输解决方案构成了他们所拥有的简短清单。而且，如果您是销售人员试图移动其中的任何一个，那么您知道他们在销售什么并不重要。您只需要知道它们的运作方式即可。

PipeCandy为帐户主管提供了一种获得所需的情报，以通过其核心解决方案（潜在客户）向合法潜在客户进行明智的呼吁，尽管这并不是PipeCandy所做的。运行自己的内部数据平台的大型公司可以通过消防人API访问一套自定义的PipeCandy数据。电子商务企业主可能会像他们的销售代表一样，从其研究人员服务获得的市场趋势报告中获得尽可能多的用途。

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价钱

PipeCandy的三种产品中的每种产品都分别定价 - 无论如何，确实没有理由将它们捆绑在一起。探矿者和消防人员本质上是一种或情况，可以通过不同的方法使您获得相同的数据。研究人员的报告是按点菜提供的，但也是高度定制的，因此您将与某人交谈以获取所需的东西。

这三种产品的定价如下：

探矿者

• 免费，$ 0/月 -1 user can perform 100 searches per month, view 10 company profiles per day, and can get email support. Company profiles will only show you some basic information about the company, their categories, and you’ll be able to learn which website tech they use (e-commerce, CMS, etc.)
  
• Online, $2,500/quarter ($9k/year if paid annually) —2个用户，每月1K搜索，每天250个公司配置文件，10个保存搜索，自动撤销出口公司的个人资料，电子邮件支持以及对CRM集成的访问。其他销售用户可以以每月50美元的价格添加。
  
• Commerce, $3,750/quarter ($13.5k/year if paid annually) —3 users, 5k searches per month, 500 profiles per day, unlimited saved searches, auto-refresh, email and phone support, additional sales accounts at $100 each per month. Additional company profile data including: Commerce Model (B2B vs B2C, Physical store presence, shipping policies, order volume) and Payment Model (payment gateways, cards accepted, alternative payment methods)
• 企业，起价为每年25,000美元 -3个用户，每月10k搜索，每天1K配置文件，无限搜索，自动删除，优先电子邮件和电话支持，其他销售帐户，每月150美元。

除这些计划中的任何一个外，还有一个联系数据附加：一个带有500个联系记录的.CSV文件，您可以以250美元的价格购买。

消防水带

• 电子商务公司数据API，起价为5万美元/年 -Customize what data you want to get and connect it to your own in-house systems
  

研究员

• Syndicated Reports, $5k each —Total Addressable Market reports
  

• 定制研究，每个$ 20K -PipeCandy的数据科学家将回答您可能有的任何（相关）问题

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The Details

PipeCandy专用面前获得数据your face, and toward that end its interface is all business. Log in and you are presented with the search screen, where you can start finding companies that look like the kind of prospects you’d want to approach. You can do a keyword search, which looks through all the text within websites, but this isn’t really necessary except for the most niche of companies. The next option down in your search criteria is “Has Own E-commerce,” which we don’t really understand. Looking at the options we can select for this (Yes or No) doesn’t shine any added light on the situation, and when you look at a company’s profile there’s nothing in there that would even hint that this information is here, whatever that information is.

Fortunately, things get a lot better from here, as there are more than 20 other criteria, each with tons of options, for you to start defining what qualifications you’re looking for. There are obvious filters, like for geography, sales figures, and total website visits—and even with expected things like this PipeCandy’s attention to detail is worth praising. When you search for a company that’s doing between $1m and $5m in sales, for example, you’re getting numbers that are strictly web sales—very helpful when you’re dealing with a company with a strong physical presence.

您也可以围绕技术添加很多标准。如果您是MailChimp的销售代表，则无需浪费您与已经使用的公司的时间；取而代之的是，您可以将目光投向那些使用Klaviyo，Aweber和其他竞争对手的人。这种技术搜索几乎涵盖了电子商务公司可能使用的任何内容 - 附加的网络，广告交换，内容管理系统，您可以命名。

然后有一些标准并不那么明显。在“商品策略”部分中，您可以指定是否要找到出售自己的产品的公司，或者是转售商和/或销售商的公司。他们也有身体吗？他们会卖给其他企业吗？直接向客户？给政府？他们的业务模式是什么？订阅？全渠道？这些都是您可以搜索的所有内容，这意味着这是PipeCandy拥有的所有数据。 And that means, even if you’re not searching based on these criteria, it’s intel you can learn about companies you’re prospecting.

还有一件重要的事情，它属于“应该在这里的明显事物”类别。我们谈论的是联系数据。如果您不知道该与谁联系并谈论它，则这些信息都不是非常有用的。And it’s downright weird to be able to know what shopping cart platform they use, how they advertise, and how much revenue they pull in, and then when you make a call you say something vague like, “Can I speak with whoever is the decision maker?” Yes, you can purchase the contact information as a separate item, but this feels like selling someone a luxury car and then making them pay extra for the keys.

For any combination of search criteria you put together, you can save the search and go back to it any time. A mouse click on the saved search runs it immediately. And, as PipeCandy is adding new companies to its database every day, you’ll always get the most updated results. Another feature with an eye toward efficiency is the ability to create lists of different companies. It’s not mind-blowing or anything, but it does allow you to segment your prospects in logical ways.

这就是所有的管道。除了卓越的搜索功能和几个适度的功能来组织所有功能外，该平台您唯一可以要求的另一件事就是提供准确的数据。While we can’t tell you that’s the case without calling up companies and asking them to verify the data we saw when playing around with PipeCandy, we can let you know that the company’s built quite a good reputation for itself based on the quality of their data. If you look at customer review sites likeG2要么Capterra，您会在两件事上看到广泛的共识。首先是他们的数据既准确又有帮助，第二个是PipeCandy团队很棒的工作。我们阅读了几次评论（并观看了一段视频），在那里客户服务的乐趣和包容性都受到赞扬。

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Integrations

There’s really only one kind of integration that would make sense for PipeCandy, and that’s to have the platform connect to CRM software like Salesforce or Hubspot. And the good news is, they offer those two software integrations (the bad news is those are the only two they integrate with). Still, it’s great to be able to have all this information available to you, and it’s even better to get all that good data into the CRM you use as a reference when you actually make contact with prospects.

Also, while not exactly an integration, it’s worth mentioning their Chrome extension. With the extension, you can get all the data that you’d get while logged into the PipeCandy platform, except you’ll see it when you’re looking at that company’s website also. Again, this is helpful in having a way to reference all this information without having to switch back and forth between windows.

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结论

当然，有很多方法可以获取PipeCandy提供的一些信息。您可以通过访问建造并获得Crunchbase的公司历史和财务状况来查看公司的技术，这只是列举几个选择。但是，没有任何选项使您能够从零搜索（这意味着您还不知道要调查的公司），而且没有一个可以为您提供其业务模型和目标客户的较小但重要的细节。最重要的是，似乎没有人理解有关电子商务公司甚至会有什么意义。

PipeCandy能够提供所有这些，其中一个缺点是您必须为联系信息支付额外费用。这不会否定平台的价值，而是它是一个监视器的刺激物。不过，即使这样，PipeCandy还是它的班级中最好的。他们的网站将该软件描述为您的帐户主管的“ Wingman”，该标签与数据一样准确。