When you use a web tool every day, you loose perspective of the improvements and progress that is rolled out on a regular basis. Jigsaw is one of those tools that is active on my screen every day of the week. I had the privilege of attending the Jigsaw Rainmaker Conference this year the the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas. Kevin Akeroyd, General Manager of the Jigsaw Business Unit comforted the crowd of 100+ of the top Jigsaw members when he recapped the past year since the acquisition by Salesforce.com. The key that I took from Kevin was the emphasis on “focus”, that the Jigsaw team understands what got them to this point in their success and that they will continue to use their crowdsourcing approach to grow the business.
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Frank Engelhardt, VP Product Management reviewed the improvements and new features that have been rolled out over the last several months. Each in it’s own right improves the value that I receive from Jigsaw, but when taken as a whole it made me say “Wow”.
Here is the list Frank and team shared:
- Ability to update a record without buying it.
- Exclude your current contacts from searches.
- Search Jigsaw by email address in the simple search.
- Ability to delete contact records without purchasing (Rainmakers only).
- You can now sort the fields from your searches and records, and that sort is remembered in the future.
- Ability to include/exclude specific Jigsaw users in your search.
- You can now select how many results you want to view per page (up to 200).
- Saved searches that you can save has been increased from 5 to 15.
In addition to the value that each of the above features adds, what was noticeable for me was that many of these improvements came directly from Jigsaw users using the Jigsaw Community tab and the New Ideas area. Jenny Berthiaume, Community Programs Manager at Jigsaw takes pride in the growth and involvement of her members. Jigsaw was one of the pioneers in the use of crowdsourcing to build it’s data and it is clear that they still value the input from their users/customers. Even the Salesforce.com acquisition is now a year ago, the value of the crowd is still clearly in the DNA of Jigsaw. They need to be commended for that. There are new features and capabilities in the works and as a customer and fan, I am very excited to see the results of their efforts.