Crunchbase Releases New Features for Salespeople

Crunchbase unveiled a redesigned search experience to help users find companies, products, and services faster through more intuitive search filters that react in real time.

This updated search experience follows Crunchbase's recently redesigned homepage that marked its transition to a prospecting tool. Crunchbase had long been an outlet for venture capital and investment firms to find acquisition targets, but has recently renewed a focus to help marketing and sales professionals with accounts.

Arman Javaherian, head of product at Crunchbase, said in a blog post earlier today that the redesign offers "a better way to find the companies that matter, a personalized homepage that gets you there faster, and an expanded dataset with even more companies."

Among the new features are the following:

• An activity feed that surface important updates about funding rounds, acquisitions, and general news, based on the companies in each user's My Follows list;
• Personalized suggestions for companies to follow based on users' Crunchbase activity and powered by machine learning;
• A shortcuts bar that enables quicker access to user lists and recent searches;
• A discovery bar that helps users uncover up-and-coming companies based on recent funding rounds and companies trending in the last week; and
• A real-time alerts feature that lets users know critical information about the companies they're tracking.

Crunchbase has several additional features in the works that will help salespeople pivot to a more impactful account-based selling approach. These include a new company profile layout with tabbed navigation that highlights important insights and a signals feature that will build off existing indicators like funding rounds and acquisitions to signify a company’s readiness to buy or do business. The first new signal will be leadership hires

Starting this summer, Crunchbase users will be able to push prospects in Crunchbase to Salesforce with a few clicks. "This is a major step in our effort to improve the sales prospecting process on Crunchbase," Javaherian said.

Other scheduled additions include a new company profile layout that highlights important insights, "so you get what you need at a glance," according to Javaherian, with "quick ways to track and organize company information using Crunchbase or by syncing to Salesforce."

Crunchbase's API is also getting an upgrade. API version 4.0 "gives users refined search capabilities that deliver only the data they're looking for, along with increased reliability and speeds up to 10 times faster to streamline workflows," Javaherian said.

Crunchbase also completely redesigned its search capabilities with more intuitive filters that users can add or remove to refine search results on the fly; live updates, the ability to save frequent searches, and automatic alerts when there are new matching results.

Crunchbase is also expanding its coverage areas beyond North America. Initial plans call for data on companies in the United Kingdom and Asia, "and we have plans to expand even farther," Javaherian said.

The company is also moving into more proprietary information, adding new first-party data, contributed directly to Crunchbase by a growing network of founders, venture capital firms, accelerators, independent professionals, and governments, according to Javaherian.

"The world around us is changing faster than ever, and you don't have time to waste trying to find a needle in a haystack," he said. "That's why we're dedicated to making it easier for our users to find the information and opportunities that matter to them."

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