We made a tough decision this week. It affects over 10,000 business professionals around the world.
We decided to shut down Job Change Alerts.
It’s especially hard because of how much people love the service. Literally as I am writing this, the following email came in:
And there are many more emails we’ve received over the years with praise and adoration for the product
Before we go any further, I want to clearly state that our Prospector product continues to be our main focus for development. It has brought us more success than any other feature we’ve built, so it will continue to receive the majority of our attention.
Our customers believe Prospector is the easiest and most accurate way to build lists of leads for sales and marketing…and the market seems to agree. In the last 40 days, we’ve signed up over 40 companies for paid Salesloft Accounts.
We’d love for you to sign up for the free version and let us know your thoughts: Get Prospector
But the rest of this post will be about Job Change Alerts.
We launched Job Change Alerts in February 2012 as a marketing service to help sales people and drive inbound leads for our company. Here are some stats:
- We signed up over 10,000 unique users
- We’ve sent over 3 million Job Change Alerts emails
- At its peak, the service watched around 8 million LinkedIn profiles for Job Changes every hour
While Job Change Alerts has been a helpful service for so many, it has become extremely hard to keep it going with the restrictions from LinkedIn regarding their API.
The planned shut down date is December 1, 2013.
Why are we discontinuing the service?
While Job Change Alerts has been a helpful service for so many, it has become extremely difficult to maintain the service quality that you have come to expect. LinkedIn has made changes to their API which are detrimental to a service like ours. It is no longer feasible for us to fight against the direction LinkedIn wishes to go and risk having Job Change Alerts become a poor quality experience for everyone.
Job Change Alerts also resulted in very little direct revenue for us and is increasingly more expensive (both in terms of time and money) to maintain. And while we would love to invest into the service as a marketing channel for Salesloft, it has become prohibitive to do so.
What are my alternatives?
LinkedIn has been developing their own in-house job change alerting product for some time now. It’s already achieved an impressive degree of quality and we’ve found the results to be nearly identical to our own service. We recommend you sign up and start getting their emails today.
What is next for Salesloft & Prospector?
We’re super excited to be able to shift our full attention to Prospector. Focusing solely on this area of the product will allow us to quickly add new and helpful features. We’re listening to our users and have some wonderful new releases planned over the coming weeks.
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We thank all the users of Job Change Alerts for the great feedback and memories, the lessons learned, and the opportunity to help you become a more sincere seller.