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When any company is looking out for B2B lead sources and especially for a database of companies and key executive contacts, Dun & Bradstreet’s Hoovers Online company database is on everyone’s evaluation list. Having been around for several years and with a comprehensive database of over 23 million companies, its rightly amongst the most widely known online source for company and executive information for business to business marketers. Other than the sheer volume of data that Hoovers maintains, the amount of data on each company ranging from financial figures to locations is very comprehensive and an excellent source for company intelligence which can be useful while targeting them.  

As a business to business lead source, the Hoovers Online database comes with some of the high level executive contacts in each company, some with email addresses and some without. Although they have only high level executive decision makers such as the CEO, President, COO, CIO, VP Finance, Treasurer, VP Human Resources and so on, it can be a good source of leads provided your best target contact is a very high level executive. Hoovers currently offers connectivity to Salesforce CRM and works well to populate your Salesforce account with target companies and high level contacts.

While the Hoovers Online database is an asset to almost any marketing team, if you are on a budget which doesnt suit the subscription fee required to access Hoovers or the business contacts you need are more deep-rooted and more specific roles than the high level key executives it offers, then it may make more sense to use a custom role based list building service like ReadyContacts or evaluate other alternative sources. If these are not constraints, a Hoovers subscription is always a valuable asset to have.