Nov 21st, 2008| 
The idea behind RainKing is simple. RainKing employs dozens of human researchers (yes human as opposed to the non-human kind) to go out and research managers, decision makers and executives in larger companies. The researchers constantly revisit companies as they comb through new hires, changes in corporate structure and new points of contact. Since humans are doing the grunt work (as opposed to web-spiders) the quality of information is higher, but the drawback is the labor intensity of the effort. This leads to a lower number of contacts in the database – it’s the age old conundrum of quality vs. quantity.
Once you subscribe to the RainKing service you’ve web access to all of these contacts divided by managerial level and departments within the companies. You can shift through these contacts and generate various prospects with the organization as part of your game plan. This tool allows you to spread your sales message in ubiquitous manner to the right targets within the company. If you don’t find the right contacts you can click on “contact human researcher” (aha, now you see why it’s important to have a human researcher.) This researcher will then go out and make calls, stalk employees and look into a clairvoyant ball to get the information you need.
“In this day and age, it’s all about intelligent selling. Generic messages simply don’t engage any more, especially at the enterprise level. Unless sales people & marketers can micro-target their message with highly relevant content and value added ideas, they simply won’t get noticed. Inside information and great sales intelligence is the key” said Paul Marcus. “No matter how good your lead generation engine is, at the end of the day your sales guy is the key – the main facilitator to the sale and the face of your company. Our goal is to make your sales team look like they’ve done 10 hours of homework before the call, this is how you stand out in a tough market.”
The way the model pays for itself is through economies of scale. RainKing allows several hundred companies to subscribe to its database – so effectively spreading the cost of researchers over several subscribers. But even with the costs shared, the subscription of RainKing starts in the several thousand dollars range. But I know if I tried to do it myself, it would be even more expensive. Also RainKing brings years of expertise in finding contact details that I wouldn’t be able to on my own – after all they have that clairvoyant ball in their HQ.
Another comparable product I looked at recently was ZoomInfo Powersell.
November 3rd, 2009 at 15:58
I would definitely also take a look at DiscoverOrg http://www.discoverorg.com. Their data on the IT Departments of Fortune 2000 companies and Government Agencies is the best we’ve been able to find – and we tested RainKing.