Business development executives and inside salespersons crave for direct telephone numbers of contacts in potential buyer organizations so that they can reach them directly to pitch their products and services. However, they find that company websites, Google search, and, increasingly even Hoovers, Jigsaw and other specialized contact providers, seldom provide anything more than switchboard numbers. When they dial the board numbers, they typically encounter unwieldy directory trees, or have to contend with switchboard operators, secretaries and other “gatekeepers”, if not both.
On the one hand, since a contact’s business card has much more than a direct telephone number, they’re sure that such information can’t be confidential. One the other, since they’re not able to get hold of it through web search and other sources, they’re frustrated by not being able to reach the peak performance levels they deserve to.
Enter pipl, a vertical search engine specializing on contact information.
According to pipl, a lot of people-related information is stored in repositories and databases of websites – a little known but very important part of the web that pipl calls the “deep web”. Even if the information is publicly accessible, it’s beyond the reach of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other standard search engines that crawl only static web pages, and not repositories or databases. With its unique ability to reach the deep web, pipl claims to be “the most comprehensive people search on the web”.
When I recently put pipl to test with my own name, I was stunned by the results. To paraphrase Capt. Kirk of Star Trek, pipl boldly went where no other search engine has gone before. Its search results contained one entry that showed my mobile phone number.
While this information is present in my business card and email signature, it’s not publicly available and certainly not visible in the blog post to which this entry links.
This example convinces me that pipl can expose a piece of my contact information that business development executives and inside salespersons would find valuable but won’t be locate on my website or blog, access through Google search or find out even by subscribing to specialist contact providers’ databases. At the risk of generalizing from this single example, it does appear that pipl digs the web deeper in order to deliver contact information that’s richer than what’s available from other publicly-available sources.
PS: I’ve sort of figured out how pipl must’ve found out my mobile # but I’m letting readers take a guess. Hint: Deep dive into the linked blog post.