British sales intelligence service DueDil is looking to challenge LinkedIn in the connected executives prospecting game.  With the exception of InsideView, which offers its own Relationship Capital Management (RCM) tool, sales intelligence vendors have shied away from building “who knows who” tools.  Instead, they have followed a coopetition strategy which encourages free LinkedIn alongside their service.  This strategy provides hyperlinks to company and executive profiles on LinkedIn, but does not compete directly with LinkedIn’s RCM features.

DueDil Connect helps users identify and connect to decision makers, map and understand their network connections, and alert users on company news related to their contact network.  Users can also filter by colleague connections within Advanced Search.

“DueDil Connect allows teams to use the power of their social networks to work together – enabling them to find the ideal contact at any company and the best way to reach them” – DueDil CEO Damian Kimmelman

Privacy is an important issue with respect to RCM as rainmakers wish to control their relationships and are wary of sales reps leveraging their network without discussing it with them first.  Users may also wish to restrict which contacts they share.  This is particularly true at firms managing confidential relationships.  CEO Damian Kimmelman noted that enterprise access can be partitioned by teams at the request of a client.  Furthermore, “If your profile is on DueDil Connect, it’s because we could find a publicly available social profile and only in that scenario. In compliance with EU privacy laws, we’ll remove any information you don’t want displayed as soon as possible after you’ve requested it to our support team. You’re also free to unlink your account at any time.”

Contact networks are imported from Google Gmail or Microsoft Exchange.  The system shares emails but not direct dials.  Users may remove an association by navigating to the executive’s profile page, but DueDil does not appear to offer direct group management of relationships.

DueDil, which is built on UK and Irish filings data, benefits from the deep set of Directors and Shareholders (DASH) filings in the European market.  These DASH filings allow prospectors to view current and previous directorships along with disqualifications.  One limitation to these datasets is they often list the positions as Director or Corporate Secretary, not the job function or role within the organization.

“A lot of people use LinkedIn to do their prospecting [and] lead generation.  LinkedIn is built off user generated content, and as such it’s really not comprehensive,” said Kimmelman.  “On LinkedIn you have to know the businesses that you are prospecting – most businesses that you prospect you actually don’t know the name of, you only know their characteristics.  To take that further, when you look at something like LinkedIn, you are utilising only one form of ability to get in contact with those businesses, which is InMail. Most marketers or salespeople want to either use social avenues, or they want to be able to cold call, they want to be able to direct mail, or they want to be able to utilise the biggest business network, which is email.”

InMail is a significant LinkedIn vulnerability.  LinkedIn is looking at how it can be a sales tool without  allowing its members to be inundated with sales messages.  This is attempting to square the circle.  Either you provide sales connectivity or you don’t.  Their compromise was restricting access to emails and direct dial information while preventing users from downloading prospecting lists or uploading them to CRMs.  They don’t even allow CRM synching for individual records.  Instead, LinkedIn provides limited access to their InMail text only messaging service.  InMail is not tied into corporate emails, lacks templates and corporate branding, and bars attachments.  In short, it oftentimes feels like spam.

Along with DASH intelligence, DueDil provides much deeper company intelligence than LinkedIn which is generally limited to repurposed marketing content from corporate websites and Facebook.   DueDil company content includes UK corporate financials, credit scores, family trees, and original filings.

DueDil Connect is available to enterprise clients with plans to make the service available to premium and free users in the future.