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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Hoover’s Mobile App Dials Up a New B2B Model  those? Well, for openers, the new Hoover’s Near Here app hits you with a $29.99 ($19.99 for a limited time) price point that is uncommon in a space where most paid product sticks below the $1.99 bar to ensure market penetration. Second, this is that true rara avis in the iPhone ecosystem, an app that is tightly targeted at the b2b world. Out of more than 130,000 apps in the iPhone/iPod Touch Store on iTunes, barely more than 1% of them (according to Hoover’s estimate) are business apps. But even more to the point is that business database and directory kingpin Hoover’s is experimenting with a new content and business model that ultimately will inform the rest of what the company does. Hoover’s has a longstanding reputation for its massive database of leads and company research data. Now the b2b publisher has re-tooled that data and model toward developing a much wider set of customized tools to address different users’ specific roles within a company. This is an iPhone app with a larger purpose. Near Here is not “Hoover's Mobile” at all. It is a very utilitarian, location-based, task-specific use of the Hoover's data that answers the road-bound salesman’s perennial question: which are the best prospects right here, right now?“Over the last seven months we re-platformed the entire Hoover’s product,” says Peter Poulin, evp of marketing. The longstanding Hoover’s platform was based on old technology that wove together the database with the presentation layer so it was difficult to develop new products without major reprogramming. The revised structure separates data from presentation and adds a new integration layer that lets Hoover's and third parties develop tools that slice, dice and repurpose the core value proposition of the brand - its deep company profiles - in more flexible ways. The iPhone app embodies a new approach that recognizes that one size of Hoover's data does not fit all seats at an enterprise subscriber's company. Near Here is for the sales guy in the field. “It’s for sale prospecting,” says Lindsay Duran, product marketing manager. The Near Here app uses the iPhone’s GPS system to locate the salesperson and let them use a map and simple filters to show businesses in their immediate vicinity and all of the basic profile and contact data Hoover's attaches to them. “The use case is you are a traveling salesperson and your three appointments just canceled," she says. "You need to make the most of your day. We give you the addresses and phone numbers, the revenues and the top executives, and even the directions, to the right companies near you.” That term “use case” is important to the design of the app as well as to Hoover’s in general. The company is starting to design tools throughout its products that align with specific jobs in their client companies. Hoover's has about 1,400 enterprise customers who buy the  software-as-a-service by site license and number of seats using the service. “But it’s not just about the data anymore,” says Poulin. “There is data everywhere. There is cognitive overload. There needs to be more focus on the tools that let you extract the data that is relevant to your role." A salesperson, marketer, and researcher at a company will use Hoover’s differently, and so the company is leveraging the new infrastructure to develop tools by the use case. The iPhone app, while pricey, is set at precisely the value beta testers said they thought it was worth. From customer feedback, "the analysis showed that the optimal price was exactly $31.28,” says Poulin. The app is already ranked #53 among the 4,700 business apps in the Apple App Store. Hoover's is planning to use advertising in other business apps to drive awareness and use the Near Hear app to introduce the Hoover's brand to a new audience of potential clients. Ultimately, they see the mobile apps becoming more integrated with the site licensed products so that the company can sell packages of role-specific tools to their customers that all draw from the same core data product but in vastly different ways. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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