November 18, 2008
Broadlook Announces Sales Contact List Optimization Product
By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Pewaukee, Wisconsin-based Broadlook Technologies has announced the availability of Ellis, a product the Broadlookers describe as a “service-based remedy for keeping sales contact lists optimized.”
Evidently the product improves and expands contact information by way of three core elements: skilled people, name parsing technology and a proprietary six phase process, company officials say: “At the heart of the parsing process is Broadlook’s scoring system that ranks the contact information it gleans from thousands of real-time Internet data sources.”
Where previously a company may have only three or four valid points of contact, now there will be eight or ten, Broadlook officials explain.
Last year Broadlook announced the Google (News - Alert) Desktop search function of their Diver software. The desktop search function allows searchers to extract résumés and contact information from Google Desktop search results.
"Google is obviously the most powerful search engine out there, and the new desktop search function does a tremendous job of indexing the file system on your computer," said Donato Diorio, founder and CEO of Broadlook Technologies at the time. "For someone wanting to compile contact information quickly and easily, it's like chocolate and peanut butter."
Ellis’s process is described as understanding the organization’s needs by performing a needs analysis, then acquiring, normalizing, merging and de-duplicating existing raw data from client sources, then separating refined data and scoring it based on client needs and specifications, extracting real-time data from across the Internet which is then sourced, extracted and scored, then loading the sales organization’s “personal Ellis consultant reviewed results” into the organization’s source system according to its preferred method.
Ellis’ six phases expand on the traditional “normalize, merge, de-duplicate” process for generating contact data, using the sales organization’s supplied data, for what company officials call “extreme data augmentation.”
Ellis supports all CRM systems including NetSuite, SalesForce.com, SugarCRM (News - Alert), OnContact, Sage SalesLogix and Maximizer.
Broadlook officials say Ellis services can be administered on a one-time, refresh (monthly/quarterly/annual) or retainer (continual/as-needed) basis.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Jessica Kostek