Data.Gone

On May 4, 2019 it’s official: data.com connect is shutting down. You may remember data.com connect in its original incarnation as Jigsaw.com. Salesforce.com acquired Jigsaw in 2010, paying huge dollars to kick-start an ambitious plan to not only be a software platform to manage sales activities, but to help companies maintain and grow their sales leads as well.

Lest you think Salesforce was lacking in ambition, it then acquired the data.com domain name for $1.5 million. Jigsaw moved over to data.com, and Salesforce began to execute on its vision of a data marketplace, where its software users could discover, purchase and seamlessly import third-party data into Salesforce. It was a big, slick and arguably brilliant idea.

But an idea falls far short of a successful strategy, and data.com never appeared to be much more than an idea, or more accurately, a series of ideas. And Salesforce, for all its success, never figured out decisively what it wanted data.com to be when it grew up. Add in competing corporate strategies, office politics, a high-growth core business and a go-go culture, and it’s perhaps not surprising that data.com quickly became a corporate orphan.

 More fundamentally though, we see once again that software companies – despite lots of brave talk – just don’t “get” data. In particular, a good database needs care and feeding using processes and techniques that are messy, imperfect, never-ending and perhaps most importantly of all, impossible to simply automate and forget.

 Jigsaw probably looked like a light lift to Salesforce. After all, the brilliance of Jigsaw was it was crowd-sourced data. The people using the data committed to correcting it and adding to it. On the surface, it probably looked like a perpetual motion machine to Salesforce. But that perception couldn’t be farther from the truth. Crowdsourcing is an intensely human activity, because you have to motivate and incent users to keep working on the database. You have to construct a structure that rewards top producers and pushes out bad actors. You have to relentlessly monitor quality and comprehensiveness. It’s endless fine-tuning, lots of trial and error, and a deep understanding of how to motivate people.

This is where Salesforce failed. It either didn’t understand the commitment required or didn’t want to do the work required. And just as a crowdsource database can grow quickly, it can also decline quickly.

I’ve said it before: I see more success among data providers that develop software around their data than software companies trying to develop their own databases.

Getting Your Data Into the (Work)Flow

In a fascinating move this week, Salesforce announced a new plug-in offering tight integration with Microsoft Outlook. This new capability, still in beta release, is offered free to Salesforce customers with its Enterprise plan or higher.

Why is this fascinating? First of all, Salesforce compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the CRM space, so this is arguably a shot across Microsoft’s bow on that front. But more importantly, it’s showing the growing importance of both applications and tight integration to data publishers.

One of the great weak spots of most CRMs has long been email integration. Getting email from one’s email client to the CRM has tended to be clunky and far from automatic. Getting salespeople to send email from the CRM tended not to be practical, and nobody wanted email messages spread across two systems.

This new integration from Salesforce doesn’t magically solve all these issues, but it’s a big step forward to making the user’s preferred systems and processes more powerful. And that’s exactly the mantra we’ve been preaching to the data industry for many years now. Get into the user’s work environment and get in deep. This is a great example of this principle at work. And even better, the many data publishers already leveraging the Salesforce platform can leverage it immediately and for free.

This brings up a larger discussion about data publishers becoming dependent on third-party platforms. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. And part of that decision process involves an honest assessment about whether or not you can reasonably achieve deep embedment like this yourself.

Another useful point this new plug-in highlights: for all its issues and flaws, email isn’t going away anytime soon. And because it is arguably the most core workflow tool at most companies, it is arguably the most important place to seek to embed your data … provided your data makes sense in this context.