Blogs

[#1]

Dear Connect Community,

I’m pleased to announce the Spring '15 release of Data.com Connect.  Spring '15 for Connect is a game-changer, with innovations on the business card to help you be smarter about your contacts - and their businesses - than ever before.

Here are some of the release highlights:

Exclusive Features for Closers and Above

Members who contribute new high-quality contacts, and who help maintain the quality of contacts that are already in the database, are already recognized for their contributions with increasingly higher community tiers - Closer, Maven, and then Rainmaker.  With this release we’re introducing features that are available only to members who have achieved the Closer (or higher) tier, as a reward for their contributions.

New Rookie Tier

With this release Connect is raising the bar on what it takes to join the Connect community and providing a new level of protection against fraudulent updates.  Connect has established a tier for new members - Rookie - that introduces a short delay before new members get points for their contributions to allow the quality of their contributions to be assessed before they receive their points.

Company News (Pilot)

Understanding what’s happening at companies you’re prospecting is critical to establishing relationships, and helps ensure that you are selling solutions that meet the companies’ business needs. In this release, members who have achieved the Closer, Maven, or Rainmaker tier now see the latest company news on business cards for most contacts that they own.  By visiting the business card page on Connect before every call,  these community members can be sure that they have the latest news about their prospects and customers.

Contact Responsibilities (Pilot)

At Connect, we know that community members have rich insights about the contacts you do business with, in addition to the contact info you already trade. So, with this release we're expanding Connect to enable trusted members at the Closer, Maven, and Rainmaker tiers to share information about their contacts' job responsibilities with the community. With this additional information - that is only available on Connect - members can prospect more efficiently by targeting contacts with the appropriate responsibilities.  

Because community members’ interactions with contacts vary, member insights into contact responsibilities may differ. For example, is a particular IT director responsible for ‘Database Administration’, or for Network Administration … or for both?  To further enrich community contact info, members can vote on a contact's job responsibilities. Then, when trusted members visit their owned contacts' business cards they'll see an aggregate of the job responsibility votes from their fellow members.

Interested in Learning More?

For more information about other new capabilities as well as for the limitations of the Company News and Contact Responsibilities pilot, see our Release Notes.  And stay tuned to The Corner for blog posts by our Product Managers, with more details about the new features and tips on making the most of Connect.

As always, if you have product ideas or feedback, please submit them (or vote on existing ideas) in the Member Idea Exchange, join us on Product Advisory Council calls, or sign up to participate in product usability studies and surveys.

See you in The Corner,

Sancho Pinto, Sr. Director of Data.com Connect

[#2]

@DataIsFun 

Congrats on the latest release Sancho and team!    Great work!

Favorite new feature out of the Spring '15 lineup so far is the new rookie tier.   Great way of reducing abuse and protecting the entire community's work.    It's also a feature that was developed in direct response to community requests.  

Great job on the quick turnaround.

Looking forward to seeing what the Contact Responsibilities and Company news features look like once they get out of the pilot stage.   It's great to see that the next generation business card that Andy MacMillan, Hawro Mustafa and yourself told us about at ConnectCon 2014 is coming to life right before our eyes.

Any hints as to what is coming in the next release?   

[#3]

Thanks for the great work!  

I appreciate the rookie tier as well.  Recently "new company" adds I found were malware (and I marked as such)

I am seeing the "responsiblities to choose", but does data.com have a complete list of them for us to take a look at or just the ones that pop up on the contact?

[#4]

Hi @BlueWorks36 

Thanks for the feedback! For the first version of our responsibilities pilot, the responsibilities shown are the top responsibilities commonly associated with the department the contact is placed in. Our goal is to improve on the responsibility taxonomy so we welcome any feedback in that area.  Feel free to reach out to me if you have suggestions. Thanks! 

[#5]

I feel that the placement of the "company news" should not be under the contact name but under the business name.

Business card history icon should be placed before the company news and responsibilites.

[#6]

I wish there was a way to prevent the Contact Responsibilities box to stop popping up everytime an update is done. It blocks the content and it is quite annoying to have to "x" on it to remove it. Having this pop up everytime you are in a contact updating it is a real real booger.