Crunchbase is a provider of private-company prospecting and research solutions. The vendor boasts that over 60 million users—including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors, and market researchers—use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities, and that companies all over the world rely on Crunchbase to power their applications, making over 3 billion calls to their API each year.
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HG Insights Platform
Score 4.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
The HG Insights platform provides a view into global industries, markets, and companies allowing users to identify the most valuable opportunities and build strategies to maximize revenue and accelerate growth.
The data is outdated and has significant gaps. It is mostly a replication of what is easily and publicly available, with little value added. Their predatory subscription model includes no notice of renewal and they are very antagonistic towards their customers.
The HG Insights Platform has helped us with GTM planning as we segment accounts amongst our verticals. There are verticals with specific tech stacks that we would like to prioritize, and HG Insights allows us to do that. The account scoring allows us to prioritize outreach efforts. We are able to use the technographics to weigh scoring and assign those accounts out accordingly.
Account-Based Data. Employee range, website, industry, company description, chief executives, latest news, etc. All for the given company you are researching.
Salesforce integration. I have not used it, but the functionality is supposed to be great. You can run data enrichment in your CRM with the Crunchbase data.
Funding, mergers, and acquisitions data. Crunchbase has relationships with thousands of VC firms throughout the world and followup with each very regularly to be able to serve up the latest data to their users.
Tech integrations. Integrations with tools like Bombora, Builtwith, Siftery, and others are really useful because you can use Crunchbase's company profile-based research method, and see the data from these tools specifically related to the given company.
In our experience, the customer service is horrible to non existent. If we were a fortune 100 company with a staff of computer people I am sure this would be a valuable service as they would "speak the language" but that is not us. Not being able to reach customer service when we are thinking about upgrading is, in my opinion, a crazy business model.
It’s very easy to use, and the team is very responsive and friendly to work with. The information is unique and usable and can complement some of the data we get from call recordings. The integration with Salesforce is easy to implement and offers good insights into our database.
They give standard answers. They are not a customer first business. I tried to cancel my subscription after using it for only 1 week as we found the information was outdated and not at all useful. But they would not cancel the year long subscription I mistakenly signed up for
Ptichbook. This platform is more detailed and has a lot more information regarding round details. The platform also has other features to build lists, market maps, landscapes and access reports and raw data about companies by vertical or any other segmentation. Also provides emails on c-suite. Crunchbase however is an easier tool to use so if complicated segmentation is not required, Crunchabse is a great solution. It's also super fast to access and provides a succinct and easy to read profile view.
We have evaluated all of these vendors and some are used in tangent with the HG Insights Platform. We found that for technographic data in particular HG gave the best coverage, but a few of these do help "fill the gaps" when occasion calls. We also use multiple intent engines to help verify trends rather than being reliant on one platform. Other vendors also offer contact data as well which is integral for our outbound marketing campaigns which HG does not cover. Overall HG does perhaps stack up better than some of these however, it is only one source of data and using multiple is necessary to give a reliable result.
I don't massively get involved in financial matters, but the propensity models we use internally to help run our campaigns are certainly a big factor when our sales people approach our clients.
Every campaign sold now comes with a flat data fee for us to run and use a propensity model for the activity we complete on behalf of our clients.
Whilst the client will never see the raw data behind the model (of which HG does play a part along with our other data sources) they are briefed on the methodology and reasoning behind them.
