Manta.com is offering what company officials call "detailed, up-to-date intelligence on 45 million company profiles worldwide" to add to its CRM offerings.

 

Pamela Springer, president and CEO of ECNext, the parent company of Manta.com, said most Manta.com users are from small-to mid-size companies with "limited time and budgets to conduct prospecting research or identify revenue opportunities."

 

"Time to insight accelerates time to execution," says John Blossom, president and senior analyst at Shore Communications Inc. and industry expert in content publishing, content technology and knowledge management.

 

"Ninety-two percent of sales representatives are not adequately prepared for sales calls," said Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and publisher of Selling Power. The consulting firm Accenture (News - Alert) reported that sales representatives spend on average two hours a day looking for company information -- and 50 percent of the information gathered is useless, according to Gschwandtner.

 

With "recently improved sorting and filtering criteria" added to Manta.com's CRM tools, business users get "more focused company information," company officials say. This is key because "in the past 10 years, face-to face selling has gone from 40 percent down to 10 percent," said Gschwandtner.

 

About this time last year Manta.com added career resources and job search to its company information site. The feature allowed job searchers to access employment information in addition to company profiles.

 

In addition to the existing Business Resource Center, ECNext's Manta.com began offering users a "Career Resource Center" featuring daily Career Tips, a Career Blog, an extensive job search, detailed company profiles and more. 

 

"The notion is simple," company officials said at the time, to "allow users to look for a job and then research a potential employer -- at the same time and on the same site."

 

Pamela Springer, President and CEO of ECNext, the company that created Manta, said they observed that visitors were researching companies to find information on potential employers, or to prepare for interviews: "The next logical step was to add job listings and other tools to help jobseekers."