TOKYO – Sansan, Inc. announces it has updated the concept from being a cloud-based contact management service to being a service for sales digital transformation (DX), with added functionality that makes it a database to power companies’ sales.

To enhance this functionality, Sansan also strengthened its cooperation with Teikoku Databank, Ltd. (“TDB”). Information owned by TDB, encompassing more than 1 million companies, will be integrated into the Sansan database by the end of this June.

For Sansan, this means that, in addition to business cards, email signatures, webforms, and various other contact information will then be accumulated and capable of being visualized. By combining contact information with the corporate database, a company’s unique database is assembled with Sansan. This database includes not only companies with which the Sansan customer company has already been in contact, but also companies with which there has been no contact.

As a database to power sales, Sansan will help bolster individual and organizational sales strengths through the above enhanced functions.

Sansan’s History and the Concept Renewal’s Background

Sansan, focusing on the value of business cards as contact information, began to develop the cloud-based business card management service market in 2007. It has also focused on strengthening functionality as a business platform that enables more effective sharing of personal connections within an organization, use of customer management functions, and utilization of accurately digitalized contact information. There are now more than 8,000 Sansan customer companies, and use of Sansan is expanding as company-wide infrastructure.

Major changes to the business environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic have brought heightened interest in sales-related digital transformation (DX). This means customer and contact information is accumulated and utilized to enhance sales strategies and activities. Doing this also benefits from integrating publicly released corporate information with the contact information.

To help achieve this, Sansan has worked to develop functions to acquire contacts online with a high level of data security, and integrate with external services that expand information accumulated in Sansan so it is more useful toward sales activities.

Sansan has increasingly forged ties with TDB and realized essential integration of corporate information. Sansan’s own functionality has also been reinforced so that contact data accumulated within the Sansan platform can be used collectively with the above corporate information.

Additionally, to convey Sansan’s value beyond contact management, the premise for Sansan has become “The service for sales DX.” Accordingly, the service tagline was revised from “Uncover your hidden network. Find opportunities. Make deals.” to “The database to power your sales.”

Sansan’s Features as a Corporate Database

1) Corporate Information Standard in Sansan
A new corporate database tab will be added to the Sansan service. This enables viewing of TDB-owned information owned, spanning more than one million companies¹ , from within Sansan, irrespective of whether the Sansan customer company has had contact with such companies. This corporate information, as part of the database, includes industry, sales, number of employees, and capital funds. Such information can be downloaded in CSV file²  format for easy use in sales and marketing initiatives.

2) Can Accommodate All Customer Contact Points
As the pandemic increasingly moved sales activities online, Sansan quickly began offering a Virtual Cards (digital business card) function that enables accurate contact exchange online, such as in videoconferencing. Sansan also continues to expand its linkages with other services, such as in enabling Virtual Cards to be used in meetings withing Microsoft Teams or in Google Calendar, which is a part of Google Workspace. In December 2021, Sansan began offering Email Signature Import (previously Contact Inbox), which enables extraction of contacts from email signatures within Sansan.

Plans are also underway for May 2022 rollout of Smart Forms, a function that integrates Sansan website contact forms to enable extraction of information such as names, companies, email addresses, phone numbers, and other information to be added within Sansan.

Making use of these functions, a variety of contact information not limited to business cards can be accumulated and visualized on Sansan. By combining this contact information with the newly added corporate database, unique database can be constructed with Sansan, which includes not only companies with which contact is already established, but also information on companies with which there is no contact.

3) Expanding Uses for Data
The Sansan database can be connected and integrated with other systems. For example, the refined and enriched data generated by the data integration function within Sansan’s data hub can be used effectively in marketing through seamless integration with customer relationship management (CRM), salesforce automation (SFA), and marketing automation (MA) tools, such as Salesforce, Marketo, and SATORI.

Inquiries
For inquiries about services and service integration, contact Sansan at: https://www.sansan.com/sansan-contactus/

Sansan, Inc. will continue evolving to fulfill its mission of Turning Encounters into Innovation.

■Notes
¹ Some TDB corporate information is updated based on public information and includes unconfirmed business conditions. Company logos and company names shown on the upper part of the details screen for each company were independently gathered by Sansan.

² An additional fee is charged for downloading. (Some service plans do not include the download function.)

* Microsoft Teams, Teams, and Microsoft Outlook are registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.
* Google Workspace and Google Calendar are trademarks of Google LLC.
* Salesforce is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, Inc.

■About Sansan, Inc.
With its mission of “Turning encounters into innovation,” Sansan provides an ever-expanding suite of software tools that serve as business infrastructure and drive digital transformation. Its two mainstay products are the namesake Sansan B2B service for sales DX for companies and the Eight app and social network for individual businesspeople. Sansan also offers cloud-based invoice management with its Bill One platform, as well as intelligent event coordination with Seminar One. Sansan’s technologies are continually evolving to accommodate modern, hybrid workstyles.

Established: June 11, 2007
Website: https://www.corp-sansan.com
Head Office: 13th Floor, Aoyama Oval Building, 5-52-2, Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 150-0001, Japan
Capital: 6,414 million yen (as of April 11, 2022)
Business: Planning, development and sales of cloud-based contact management services

■Contact for press inquiries
Sansan Inc. Brand Communication Dept.
Email: pr@sansan.com