As speculated when I heard the news that Salesforce had purchased Jigsaw, I immediately thought what a way to boost subscriptions to SFDC.
My conjecture at the time was looking at this from a SMB perspective. Let’s say you are a SMB, especially a start-up as now many home-based businesses are. Now, you also need a CRM to manage your contacts and some degree of marketing and campaign management which is part of SFDC. As a small business your budget for lead generation is either nonexistent or very small, the purchasing of lists with contacts to call is a legitimate option.
What if SFDC offers already prepopulated contacts in their own database. With the structure of Jigsaw they aggregate that data they already have either by name, industry, company size, with email addresses and phone numbers, by verticals by system needs etc. and make it available as an additional service on top of their monthly subscription.
Being a SaaS vendor it is more probable that once they slice and dice the contact information within Jigsaw you tell them what information you are looking for and they either prepopulate the database for a flat fee based or charge a monthly subscription to allow usage of the contacts. Obviously, the more contacts and volume you require the higher the monthly subscription fee. What a great way for them to increase revenues making them more flexible and eventually more liquid. Another option is to get customers to subscribe to Jigsaw that can be used with their original CRM. This leverages new potential customers without limiting them to just use SFDC.
The service of near real-time contact information for your clients is very valuable. As service that can sold without an SFDC subscription is gold. Now pricing just has to be decided.